Title: The Gospel of the Pentateuch
Author: Kingsley, Charles, 1819-1875
Language: English
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The Gospel of the Pentateuch:  A set of Parish Sermons



PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE GOSPEL OF THE PENTATEUCH
TO THE REV. CANON STANLEY.



My Dear Stanley,

I dedicate these Sermons to you, not that I may make you responsible
for any doctrine or statement contained in them, but as the simplest
method of telling you how much they owe to your book on the Jewish
Church, and of expressing my deep gratitude to you for publishing
that book at such a time as this.

It has given to me (and I doubt not to many other clergymen) a fresh
confidence and energy in preaching to my people the Gospel of the
Old Testament as the same with that of the New; and without it, many
of these Sermons would have been very different from, and I am
certain very inferior to, what they are now, by the help of your
admirable book.

Brought up, like all Cambridge men of the last generation, upon
Paley's Evidences, I had accepted as a matter of course, and as the
authoritative teaching of my University, Paley's opinions as to the
limits of Biblical criticism, {0a} quoted at large in Dean Milman's
noble preface to his last edition of the History of the Jews; and
especially that great dictum of his, 'that it is an unwarrantable,
as well as unsafe rule to lay down concerning the Jewish history,
that which was never laid down concerning any other, that either
every particular of it must be true, or the whole false.'

I do not quote the rest of the passage; first, because you, I doubt
not, know it as well as I; and next, in order that if any one shall
read these lines who has not read Paley's Evidences, he may be
stirred up to look the passage out for himself, and so become
acquainted with a great book and a great mind.

A reverent and rational liberty in criticism (within the limits of
orthodoxy) is, I have always supposed, the right of every Cambridge
man; and I was therefore the more shocked, for the sake of free
thought in my University, at the appearance of a book which claimed
and exercised a licence in such questions, which I must (after
careful study of it) call anything but rational and reverent.  Of
the orthodoxy of the book it is not, of course, a private
clergyman's place to judge.  That book seemed dangerous to the
University of Cambridge itself, because it was likely to stir up
from without attempts to abridge her ancient liberty of thought; but
it seemed still more dangerous to the hundreds of thousands without
the University, who, being no scholars, must take on trust the
historic truth of the Bible.

For I found that book, if not always read, yet still talked and
thought of on every side, among persons whom I should have fancied
careless of its subject, and even ignorant of its existence, but to
whom I was personally bound to give some answer as to the book and
its worth.  It was making many unsettled and unhappy; it was (even
worse) pandering to the cynicism and frivolity of many who were
already too cynical and frivolous; and, much as I shrank from
descending into the arena of religious controversy, I felt bound to
say a few plain words on it, at least to my own parishioners.

But how to do so, without putting into their heads thoughts which
need be in no man's head, and perhaps shaking the very faith which I
was trying to build up, was difficult to me, and I think would have
been impossible to me, but for the opportune appearance of your
admirable book.

I could not but see that the book to which I have alluded, like most
other modern books on Biblical criticism, was altogether negative;
was possessed too often by that fanaticism of disbelief which is
just as dangerous as the fanaticism of belief; was picking the body
of the Scripture to pieces so earnestly, that it seemed to forget
that Scripture had a spirit as well as a body; or, if it confessed
that it had a spirit, asserting that spirit to be one utterly
different from the spirit which the Scripture asserts that it
possesses.

For the Scripture asserts that those who wrote it were moved by the
Spirit of God; that it is a record of God's dealings with men, which
certain men were inspired to perceive and to write down:  whereas
the tendency of modern criticism is, without doubt, to assert that
Scripture is inspired by the spirit of man; that it contains the
thoughts and discoveries of men concerning God, which they wrote
down without the inspiration of God; which difference seems to me
(and I hope to others) utterly infinite and incalculable, and to
involve the question of the whole character, honour, and glory of
God.

There is, without a doubt, something in the Old Testament, as well
as in the New, quite different in kind, as well as in degree, from
the sacred books of any other people:  an unique element, which has
had an unique effect upon the human heart, life and civilization.
This remains, after all possible deductions for 'ignorance of
physical science,' 'errors in numbers and chronology,'
'interpolations' 'mistakes of transcribers' and so forth, whereof we
have read of late a great deal too much, and ought to care for them
and for their existence, or non-existence, simply nothing at all;
because, granting them all--though the greater part of them I do not
grant, as far as I can trust my critical faculty--there remains that
unique element, beside which all these accidents are but as the
spots on the sun compared to the great glory of his life-giving
light.  The unique element is there; and I cannot but still believe,
after much thought, that it--the powerful and working element, the
inspired and Divine element which has converted and still converts
millions of souls--is just that which Christendom in all ages has
held it to be:  the account of certain 'noble acts' of God's, and
not of certain noble thoughts of man--in a word, not merely the
moral, but the historic element; and that, therefore, the value of
the Bible teaching depends on the truth of the Bible story.  That is
my belief.  Any criticism which tries to rob me of that I shall look
at fairly, but very severely indeed.

If all that a man wants is a 'religion,' he ought to be able to make
a very pretty one for himself, and a fresh one as often as he is
tired of the old.  But the heart and soul of man wants more than
that, as it is written, 'My soul is athirst for God, even for the
living God.'  Those whom I have to teach want a living God, who
cares for men, works for men, teaches men, punishes men, forgives
men, saves men from their sins; and Him I have found in the Bible,
and nowhere else, save in the facts of life which the Bible alone
interprets.

In the power of man to find out God I will never believe.  The
'religious sentiment,' or 'God-consciousness,' so much talked of
now-a-days, seems to me (as I believe it will to all practical
common-sense Englishmen), a faculty not to be depended on; as
fallible and corrupt as any other part of human nature; apt (to
judge from history) to develop itself into ugly forms, not only
without a revelation from God, but too often in spite of one--into
polytheisms, idolatries, witchcrafts, Buddhist asceticisms,
Phoenician Moloch-sacrifices, Popish inquisitions, American spirit-
rappings, and what not.  The hearts and minds of the sick, the poor,
the sorrowing, the truly human, all demand a living God, who has
revealed himself in living acts; a God who has taught mankind by
facts, not left them to discover him by theories and sentiments; a
Judge, a Father, a Saviour, and an Inspirer; in a word, their hearts
and minds demand the historic truth of the Bible--of the Old
Testament no less than of the New.

What I needed therefore, for my guidance, was a book which should
believe and confess all this, without condemning or ignoring free
criticism and its results; which should make use of that criticism
not to destroy but to build up; which employed a thorough knowledge
of the Old Testament history, the manners of the Jews, the
localities of the sacred events, to teach men not what might not be
in the Bible, but what was certainly therein; which dealt with the
Bible after the only fair and trustful method; that is, to consider
it at first according to the theory which it sets forth concerning
itself, before trying quite another theory of the commentator's own
invention; and which combined with a courageous determination to
tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, that
Christian spirit of trust, reverence and piety, without which all
intellectual acuteness is but blindness and folly.

All this, and more, I found in your book, enforced with a genius
which needs no poor praise of mine; and I hailed its appearance at
such a crisis as a happy Providence, certain that it would be, what
I now know by experience it has been, a balm to many a wounded
spirit, and a check to many a wandering intellect, inclined, in the
rashness of youth, to throw away the truth it already had, for the
sake of theories which it hoped that it might possibly verify
hereafter.

With your book in my hand, I have tried to write a few plain
Sermons, telling plain people what they will find in the Pentateuch,
in spite of all present doubts, as their fathers found it before
them, and as (I trust) their children will find it after them, when
all this present whirlwind of controversy has past,


'As dust that lightly rises up,
And is lightly laid again.'


I have told them that they will find in the Bible, and in no other
ancient book, that living working God, whom their reason and
conscience demand; and that they will find that he is none other
than Jesus Christ our Lord.  I have not apologised for or explained
away the so-called 'Anthropomorphism' of the Old Testament.  On the
contrary, I have frankly accepted it, and even gloried in it as an
integral, and I believe invaluable element of Scripture.  I have
deliberately ignored many questions of great interest and
difficulty, because I had no satisfactory solution of them to offer;
but I have said at the same time that those questions were
altogether unimportant, compared with those salient and fundamental
points of the Bible history on which I was preaching.  And therefore
I have dared to bid my people relinquish Biblical criticism to those
who have time for it; and to say of it with me, as Abraham of the
planets, 'O my people, I am clear of all these things!  I turn
myself to him who made heaven and earth.'

I do not wish, believe me, to make you responsible for any statement
or opinion of mine.  I am painfully conscious, on reviewing for the
Press Sermons which would never have been published save by special
request, how imperfect, poor, and weak they seem to me--how much
worse, then, they will appear to other people; how much more may be
said which I have not the wit to say!  But the Bible can take care
of itself, I presume, without my help.  All I can do is, to speak
what I think, as far as I see my way; to record the obligation
toward you under which I, with thousands more, now lie; and to
express my hope that we shall be always found together fellow-
workers in the cause of Truth, and that to you and in you may be
fulfilled those noble and tender words, in which you have spoken of
Samuel, and of those who work in Samuel's spirit:

'In later times, even in our own, many names spring to our
recollection of those who have trodden or (in different degrees,
some known, and some unknown) are treading the same thankless path
in the Church of Germany, in the Church of France, in the Church of
Russia, in the Church of England.  Wherever they are, and whosoever
they may be, and howsoever they may be neglected or assailed, or
despised, they, like their great prototype and likeness in the
Jewish Church, are the silent healers who bind up the wounds of
their age in spite of itself; they are the good physicians who bind
together the dislocated bones of a disjointed time; they are the
reconcilers who turn the hearts of the children to the fathers, or
of the fathers to the children.  They have but little praise and
reward from the partisans who are loud in indiscriminate censure and
applause.  But, like Samuel, they have a far higher reward, in the
Davids who are silently strengthened and nurtured by them in Naioth
of Ramah--in the glories of a new age which shall be ushered in
peacefully and happily after they have been laid in the grave.' {0b}

That such, my dear Stanley, may be your work and your destiny, is
the earnest hope of

Yours affectionately,
C. KINGSLEY.
EVERSLEY RECTORY,
July 1, 1863.



SERMON I.  GOD IN CHRIST



(Septuagesima Sunday.)

GENESIS i.  I.  In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.

We have begun this Sunday to read the book of Genesis.  I trust that
you will listen to it as you ought--with peculiar respect and awe,
as the oldest part of the Bible, and therefore the oldest of all
known works--the earliest human thought which has been handed down
to us.

And what is the first written thought which has been handed down to
us by the Providence of Almighty God?

'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.'

How many other things, how many hundred other things, men might have
thought fit to write down for those who should come after; and say--
This is the first knowledge which a man should have; this is the
root of all wisdom, all power, all wealth.

But God inspired Moses and the Prophets to write as they have
written.  They were not to tell men that the first thing to be
learnt was how to be rich; nor how to be strong; nor even how to be
happy:  but that the first thing to be learnt was that God created
the heaven and the earth.

And why first?

Because the first question which man asks--the question which shows
he is a man and not a brute--always has been, and always will be--
Where am I?  How did I get into this world; and how did this world
get here likewise?  And if man takes up with a wrong answer to that
question, then the man himself is certain to go wrong in all manner
of ways.  For a lie can never do anything but harm, or breed
anything but harm; and lies do breed, as fast as the blight on the
trees, or the smut on the corn:  only being not according to nature,
or the laws of God, they do not breed as natural things do, after
their kind:  but, belonging to chaos, the kingdom of disorder and
misrule, they breed fresh lies unlike themselves, of all strange and
unexpected shapes; so that when a man takes up with one lie, there
is no saying what other lie he may not take up with beside.

Wherefore the first thing man has to learn is truth concerning the
first human question, Where am I?  How did I come here; and how did
this world come here?  To which the Bible answers in its first line-
-

'In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.'

How God created, the Bible does not tell us.  Whether he created (as
doubtless he could have done if he chose) this world suddenly out of
nothing, full grown and complete; or whether he created it (as he
creates you and me, and all living and growing things now) out of
things which had been before it--that the Bible does not tell us.

Perhaps if it had told us, it would have drawn away our minds to
think of natural things, and what we now call science, instead of
keeping our minds fixed, as it now does, on spiritual things, and
above all on the Spirit of all spirits; Him of whom it is written,
'God is a Spirit'

For the Bible is simply the revelation, or unveiling of God.  It is
not a book of natural science.  It is not merely a book of holy and
virtuous precepts.  It is not merely a book wherein we may find a
scheme of salvation for our souls.  It is the book of the
revelation, or unveiling of the Lord God, Jesus Christ; what he was,
what he is, and what he will be for ever.

Of Jesus Christ?  How is he revealed in the text, 'In the beginning
God created the heaven and the earth?'

Thus:--If you look at the first chapter of Genesis and the beginning
of the second, you will see that God is called therein by a
different name from what he is called afterwards.  He is called God,
Elohim, The High or Mighty One or Ones.  After that he is called the
Lord God, Jehovah Elohim, which means properly, The High or Mighty I
Am, or Jehovah, a word which I will explain to you afterwards.  That
word is generally translated in our Bible, as it was in the Greek,
'The Lord;' because the later Jews had such a deep reverence for the
name Jehovah, that they did not like to write it or speak it:  but
called God simply Adonai, the Lord.

So that we have three names for God in the Old Testament.

First El, or Elohim, the Mighty One:  by which, so Moses says, God
was known to the Jews before his time, and which sets forth God's
power and majesty--the first thing of which men would think in
thinking of God.

Next Jehovah.  The I Am, the Eternal, and Self-existent Being, by
which name God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush--a
deeper and wider name than the former.

And lastly, Adonai, the Lord, the living Ruler and Master of the
world and men, by which he revealed himself to the later Jews, and
at last to all mankind in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now I need not to trouble your mind or my own with arguments as to
how these three different names got into the Bible.

That is a matter of criticism, of scholarship, with which you have
nothing to do:  and you may thank God that you have not, in such
days as these.  Your business is, not how the names got there, which
is a matter of criticism, but why they have been left there by the
providence of God, which is a matter of simple religion; and you may
thank God, I say again, that it is so.  For scholarship is Martha's
part, which must be done, and yet which cumbers a man with much
serving:  but simple heart religion is the better part which Mary
chose; and of which the Lord has said, that it shall not be taken
from her, nor from those who, like her, sit humbly at the feet of
the Lord, and hear his voice, without troubling their souls with
questions of words, and endless genealogies, which eat out the
hearts of men.

Therefore all I shall say about the matter is that the first chapter
of Genesis, and the first three verses of the second, may be the
writing of a prophet older than Moses, because they call God Elohim,
which was his name before Moses' time; and that Moses may have used
them, and worked them into a book of Genesis; while he, in the part
which he wrote himself, called God at first by the name Jehovah
Elohim, The Lord God, in order to show that Jehovah and El were the
same God, and not two different ones; and after he had made the Jews
understand that, went on to call God simply Jehovah, and to use the
two names, as they are used through the rest of the Old Testament,
interchangeably:  as we say sometimes God, sometimes the Lord,
sometimes the Deity, and so forth; meaning of course always the same
Being.

That, I think, is the probable and simple account which tallies most
exactly with the Bible.

As for the first five books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, having
been written by Moses, or at least by far the greater part of them,
I cannot see the least reason to doubt it.

The Bible itself does not say so; and therefore it is not a matter
of faith, and men may have their own opinions on the matter, without
sin or false doctrine.  But that Moses wrote part at least of them,
our Lord and his Apostles say expressly.  The tradition of the Jews
(who really ought to know best) has always been that Moses wrote
either the whole or the greater part.  Moses is by far the most
likely man to have written them, of all of whom we read in
Scripture.  We have not the least proof, and, what is more, never
shall or can have, that he did not write them.  And therefore, I
advise you to believe, as I do, that the universal tradition of both
Jews and Christians is right, when it calls these books, the books
of Moses. {7}

But now no more of these matters:  we will think of a matter quite
infinitely more important, and that is, WHO is this God whom the
Bible reveals to us, from the very first verse of Genesis?

At least, he is one and the same Being.  Whether he be called El,
Jehovah, or Adonai, he is the same Lord.

It is the Lord who makes the heaven and the earth, the Lord who puts
man in a Paradise, lays on him a commandment, and appears to him in
visible shape.

It is the Lord who speaks to Abraham:  though Abraham knew him only
as El-Shaddai, the Almighty God.  It is the Lord who brings the
Israelites out of Egypt, who gives them the law on Sinai.  It is the
Lord who speaks to Samuel, to David, to all the Prophets, and
appears to Isaiah, while his glory fills the Temple.  In whatever
'divers manners' and 'many portions,' as St. Paul says in the
Epistle to the Hebrews, he speaks to them, he is the same Being.

And Psalmists and Prophets are most careful to tell us that he is
the God, not of the Jews only, but of the Gentiles; of all mankind--
as indeed, he must be, being Jehovah, the I Am, the one Self-
existent and Eternal Being; that from his throne he is watching and
judging all the nations upon earth, fashioning the hearts of all,
appointing them their bounds, and the times of their habitation, if
haply they may seek after him and find him, though he be not far
from any one of them; for in him they live and move and have their
being.

This is the message of Moses, of the Psalmists and the Prophets,
just as much as of St. Paul on Mars' Hill at Athens.

So begins and so ends the Old Testament, revealing throughout The
Lord.

And how does the New Testament begin?

By telling us that a Babe was born at Bethlehem, and called Jesus,
the Saviour.

But who is this blessed Babe?  He, too, is The Lord.

'A Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.'  And from thence, through the
Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, the Revelation of St. John, he is
the Lord.  There is no manner of doubt of it.  The Apostles and
Evangelists take no trouble to prove it.  They take it for granted.
They call Jesus Christ by the name by which the Jews had for
hundreds of years called the El of Abraham, the Jehovah of Moses.
The Babe who is born at Bethlehem, who grows up as other human
beings grow, into the man Christ Jesus, is none other than the Lord
God who created the universe, who made a covenant with Abraham, who
brought the Israelites out of Egypt, who inspired the Prophets, who
has been from the beginning governing all the earth.

It is very awful.  But you must believe that, or put your Bibles
away as a dream--New Testament and Old alike.  Not to believe that
fully and utterly, is not to believe the Bible at all.  For that is
what the Bible says, and has been sent into the world to say.  It
is, from beginning to end, the book of the revelation, or unveiling
of Jesus Christ, very God of very God.

But some may say, 'Why tell us that?  Of course we believe it.  We
should not be Christians if we did not.'

Be it so.  I hope it is so.  But I think that it is not so easy to
believe it as we fancy.

We believe it, I think, more firmly than our forefathers did five
hundred years ago, on some points; and therefore we have got rid of
many dark and blasphemous superstitions about witches and devils,
about the evil of the earth and of our own bodies, of marriage, and
of the common duties and bonds of humanity, which tormented them,
because they could not believe fully that Jesus Christ had created,
and still ruled the world and all therein.

But we are all too apt still to think of Jesus Christ merely as some
one who can save our souls when we die, and to forget that he is the
Lord, who is and has been always ruling the world and all mankind.

And from this come two bad consequences.  People are apt to speak of
the Lord Jesus--or at least to admire preachers who speak of him--as
if he belonged to them, and not they to him; and, therefore, to
speak of him with an irreverence and a familiarity which they dared
not use, if they really believed that this same Jesus, whose name
they take in vain, is none other than the Living God himself, their
Creator, by whom every blade of grass grows beneath their feet,
every planet and star rolls above their heads.

And next--they fancy that the Old Testament speaks of our Lord Jesus
Christ only in a few mysterious prophecies--some of which there is
reason to suspect they quite misinterpret.  They are slow of heart
to believe all that the Scriptures have spoken of him of whom Moses
and the Prophets did write, not in a few scattered texts, but in
every line of the Old Testament, from the first of Genesis to the
last of Malachi.

And therefore they believe less and less, that Jesus Christ is still
the Lord in any real practical sense--not merely the Lord of a few
elect or saints, but the Lord of man and of the earth, and of the
whole universe.  They think of him as a Lord who will come again to
judgment--which is true, and awfully true, in the very deepest
sense:  but they do not think of him--in spite of what he himself
and his apostles declared of him--as The Living, Working Lord, to
whom all power is given in heaven and earth, and not merely over the
souls of a few regenerate; as the Alpha and Omega, the first and the
last, of whom St. Paul says, 'that the mystery of Christ has been
hid from the beginning of the world in God, who created all things
by Jesus Christ.' * * * 'That, in the dispensation of the fulness of
times, he might gather together in one all things in Christ, both
which are in heaven, and which are in earth.'  They fill their minds
with fancies about the book of Revelation, most of which, there is
reason to fear, are little else but fancies:  while they overlook
what that book really does say, and what is the best news that the
world ever heard, that he is the Prince of the kings of the earth.

Therefore they have fears for Christ's Bible, fears for Christ's
Church, fears for the fate of the world, which they could not have
if they would recollect who Christ is, and believe that he is able
to take care of his own kingdom and power and glory, better than man
can take care of it for him.  Surely, surely, faith in the living
Lord who rules the world in righteousness is fast dying out among
us; and many who call themselves Christians seem to know less of
Christ, and of the work which he is carrying on in the world, than
did the old Psalmist, who said of him, 'The Lord shall endure for
ever; he hath also prepared his seat for judgment.  For he shall
judge the world in righteousness, and minister true judgment among
the people.'  He fashioneth 'the hearts of all of them, and
understandeth all their works.'

Who can say that he believes that, who holds that this world is the
devil's world, and that sinful man and evil spirits are having it
all their own way till the day of judgment?

Who can say that he believes that, who falls into pitiable terror at
every new discovery of science or of scholarship, for fear it should
destroy the Bible and the Christian faith, instead of believing that
all which makes manifest is light, and that all light comes from the
Father of lights, by the providence of Jesus Christ his only-
begotten Son, who is the light of men, and the inspiration of his
Spirit, who leadeth into all truth?

And how, lastly, can those say that they believe that, who will lie,
and slander, and have recourse to base intrigues, in order to defend
that truth, and that Church, of which the Lord himself has said that
he has founded it upon a rock, and the gates of hell shall not
prevail against it?

But if you believe indeed the message of the Bible, that Jesus
Christ is the Lord who made heaven and earth, then it shall be said
of you, as it was of St. Peter, 'Blessed art thou:  for flesh and
blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father which is in
heaven.'

Yes.  Blessed indeed is he who believes that; who believes that the
same person who was born in a stable, had not where to lay his head,
went about healing the sick and binding up the broken heart,
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried, and
rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven--ascended thither
that he might fill all things; and is none other than the Lord of
the earth and of men, the Creator, the Teacher, the Saviour, the
Guide, the King, the Judge, of all the world, and of all worlds
past, present, and to come.

For to him who thus believes shall be fulfilled the promise of his
Lord, 'Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I
will give you rest.'

He will find rest unto his soul.  Rest from that first and last
question, of which I said that all men, down to the lowest savage,
ask it, simply because they are men, and not beasts.  Where am I?
How came I here?  How came this world here likewise?  For he can
answer--

'I am in the kingdom of the Babe of Bethlehem.  He put me here.  And
he put this world here likewise:  and that is enough for me.  He
created all I see or can see--I care little how, provided that HE
created it; for then I am sure that it must be very good.  He
redeemed me and all mankind, when we were lost, at the price of his
most precious blood.  He the Lord is King, therefore will I not be
moved, though the earth be shaken, and the hills be carried into the
midst of the sea.  Yea, though the sun were turned to darkness, and
the moon to blood, and the stars fell from heaven, and all power and
order, all belief and custom of mankind, were turned upside down,
yet there would still be One above who rules the world in
righteousness, whose eye is on them that fear him and put their
trust in his mercy, to deliver their soul from death, and to feed
them in the time of dearth.  Darkness may cover the land for awhile,
and gross darkness the people.  But while I sit in darkness, the
Lord shall be my light, till the day when he shall say once more,
"Let there be light," and light shall be.'

Yes.  To the man who is a good man and true; who has any hearty
Christian feeling for his fellow-men, and is not merely a selfish
superstitious person, caring for nothing but what he calls the
safety of his own soul; to the man, I say, who has anything of the
loving spirit of Christ in him, what question can be more important
than this, Is the world well made or ill?  Is it well governed or
ill?  Is it on the whole going right or going wrong?  And what can
be more comforting to such a man, than the answer which the Bible
gives him at the outset?--

This world is well made, in love and care; for Christ the Lord made
it, and behold it was very good.

This world is going right and not wrong, in spite of all appearances
to the contrary; for Christ the Lord is King.  He sitteth between
the cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet.  He is too strong and
too loving to let the world go any way but the right.  Parts of it
will often go wrong here, and go wrong there.  The sin and ignorance
of men will disturb his order, and rebel against his laws; and
strange and mad things, terrible and pitiable things will happen, as
they have happened ever since the day when the first man disobeyed
the commandment of the Lord.  But man cannot conquer the Lord; the
Lord will conquer man.  He will teach men by their neighbours' sins.
He will teach them by their own sins.  He will chastise them by sore
judgments.  He will make fearful examples of wilful and conceited
sinners; and those who seem to escape him in this life, shall not
escape him in the life to come.  But he is trying for ever every
man's work by fire; and against that fire no lie will stand.  He
will burn up the stubble and chaff, and leave only the pure wheat
for the use of future generations.  His purpose will stand.  His
word will never return to him void, but will prosper always where he
sends it.  He has made the round world so sure that it cannot be
moved either by man or by worse than man.  His everlasting laws will
take effect in spite of all opposition, and bring the world and man
along the path, and to the end, which he purposed for them in the
day when God made the heavens and the earth, and in that even
greater day, when he said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our
likeness,' and man arose upright, and knew that he was not as the
beasts, and asked who he was, and where? feeling with the hardly
opened eyes of his spirit after that Lord from whom he came, and to
whom he shall return, as many as have eternal life, in the day when
Christ the Lord of life shall have destroyed death, and put all
enemies under his feet, and given up the kingdom to God, even the
Father, that God may be all in all.



SERMON II.  THE LIKENESS OF GOD



(Trinity Sunday.)

GENESIS i. 26.  And God said, Let us make man in our image, after
our likeness.

This is a hard saying.  It is difficult at times to believe it to be
true.

If one looks not at what God has made man, but at what man has made
himself, one will never believe it to be true.

When one looks at what man has made himself; at the back streets of
some of our great cities; at the thousands of poor Germans and Irish
across the ocean bribed to kill and to be killed, they know not why;
at the abominable wrongs and cruelties going on in Poland at this
moment--the cry whereof is going up to the ears of the God of Hosts,
and surely not in vain; when one thinks of all the cries which have
gone up in all ages from the victims of man's greed, lust, cruelty,
tyranny, and shrillest of all from the tortured victims of his
superstition and fanaticism, it is difficult to answer the sneer,
'Believe, if you can, that this foolish, unjust, cruel being called
man, is made in the likeness of God.  Man was never made in the
image of God at all.  He is only a cunninger sort of animal, for
better for worse--and for worse as often as for better.'

Another says, not quite that.  Man was in the likeness of God once,
but he lost that by Adam's fall, and now is only an animal with an
immortal soul in him, to be lost or saved.

There is more truth in that latter notion than in the former:  but
if it be quite right; if we did lose the likeness of God at Adam's
fall, how comes the Bible never to say so?  How comes the Bible
never to say one word on what must have been the most important
thing which ever happened to mankind before the coming of our Lord
Jesus Christ?

And how comes it also that the New Testament says distinctly that
man is still made in the likeness of God?  For St. Paul speaks of
man as 'the likeness and glory of God.'  And St. James says of the
tongue, 'Therewith bless we God, even the Father; and therewith' (to
our shame) 'curse we men, which are made in the likeness of God.'

But the great proof that man is made in the image and likeness of
God is the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ; for if human nature
had been, as some think, something utterly brutish and devilish, and
utterly unlike God, how could God have become man without ceasing to
be God?  Christ was man of the substance of his mother.  That
substance had the same human nature as we have.  Then if that human
nature be evil, what follows?  Something which I shall not utter,
for it is blasphemy.  Christ has taken the manhood into God.  Then
if manhood be evil, what follows again?  Something more which I
shall not utter, for it is blasphemy.

But man is made in the image of God; and therefore God, in whose
image he is made, could take on himself his own image and likeness,
and become perfect man, without ceasing to be perfect God.

Therefore, my friends, it is a comfortable and wholesome doctrine,
that man is made in the image of God, and one for which we must
thank the Bible.  For it is the Bible which has revealed that truth
to us, in its very beginning and outset, that we might have, from
the first, clear and sound notions concerning man and God.  The
Bible, I say; for the sacred books of the heathen say, most of them,
nothing thereof.

Man has, in all ages, been tempted, when he looks at his own
wickedness and folly, not only to despise himself--which he has good
reason enough to do--but to despise his own human nature, and to cry
to God, 'Why hast thou made me thus?'  He has cursed his own human
nature.  He has said, 'Surely man is most miserable of all the
beasts of the field.'  He has said, 'I must get rid of my human
nature--I must give up wife, family, human life of all kinds, I must
go into the deserts and the forests, and there try to forget that I
am a man, and become a mere spirit or angel.'  So said the Buddhists
of Asia, the deepest thinkers concerning man and God of all the
heathens, and so have many said since their time.  But so does the
Bible not say.  It starts by telling us that man is made in God's
likeness, and that therefore his human nature is originally and in
itself not a bad, but a perfectly good thing.  All that has to be
done to it is to be cured of its diseases; and the Bible declares
that it can be cured.  Howsoever man may have fallen, he may rise.
Howsoever the likeness may be blotted and corrupted, it can be
cleansed and renewed.  Howsoever it may be perverted and turned
right round and away from God and goodness to selfishness and evil,
it can be converted, and turned back again to God.  Howsoever
utterly far gone man may be from original righteousness, still to
original righteousness he can return, by the grace of baptism and
the renewing of the Holy Spirit.  And what in us is the likeness of
God?  That is a deep question.

Only one answer will I make to it to-day.  Whatever in us is, or is
not, the likeness of God, at least the sense of right and wrong is;
to know right and wrong.  So says the Bible itself:  'Behold the man
is become as one of us, to know good and evil.'  Not that he got the
likeness of God by his fall--of course not; but that he became aware
of his likeness, and that in a very painful and common way--by
sinning against it; as St. Paul says in one of his deepest
utterances, 'By sin is the knowledge of the law.'

And you may see for yourselves how human nature can have God's
likeness in that respect, and yet be utterly fallen and corrupt.

For a man may--and indeed every man does--know good and yet be
unable to do it, and know evil, and yet be a slave to it, tied and
bound with the chains of his sins till the grace of God release him
from them.

To know good and evil, right and wrong--to have a conscience, a
moral sense--that is the likeness of God of which I wish to preach
to-day.  Because it is through THAT knowledge of good and evil, and
through it alone, that we can know God, and Jesus Christ whom he has
sent.  It is through our moral sense that God speaks to us; through
our sense of right and wrong; through that I say, God speaks to us,
whether in reproof or encouragement, in wrath or in love; to teach
us what he is like, and to teach us what he is not like.

To know God.  That is the side on which we must look at this text on
Trinity Sunday.  If man be made in the image of God, then we may be
able to know something at least of God, and of the character of God.
If we have the copy, we can guess at least at what the original is
like.

From the character, therefore, of every good man, we may guess at
something of the character of God.  But from the character of Jesus
Christ our Lord, who is the very brightness of his Father's glory
and the express image of his person, we may see perfectly--at least
perfectly enough for all our needs in this life, and in the life to
come--what is the character of God, who made heaven and earth.

I beseech you to remember this--I beseech you to believe this, with
your whole hearts, and minds, and souls, and especially just now.

For there are many abroad now who will tell you, man can know
nothing of God.

Answer them:  'If your God be a God of whom I can know nothing, then
he is not my God, the God of the Bible.  For he is the God who has
said of old, "They shall not teach each man his brother, saying,
Know the Lord, for all shall know Me, from the least unto the
greatest."  He is the God, who, through Jesus Christ our Lord,
accused and blamed the Jews because they did NOT know him, which if
they COULD NOT know him would have been no fault of theirs.  Of
doctrines, and notions, and systems, it is written, and most truly,
"I know in part, and I prophesy in part," and again, "If a man
thinketh that he knoweth anything, he knoweth nothing yet as he
ought to know."  But of God it is written, "This is life eternal, to
know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast
sent."'

But they will say, man is finite and limited, God is infinite and
absolute, and how can the finite comprehend the infinite?

Answer:  'Those are fine words:  I do not understand them; and I do
not care to understand them; I do not deny that God is infinite and
absolute, though what that means I do not know.  But I find nothing
about his being infinite and absolute in the Bible.  I find there
that he is righteous, just, loving, merciful, and forgiving; and
that he is angry too, and that his wrath is a consuming fire, and I
know well enough what those words mean, though I do not know what
infinite and absolute mean.  So that is what I have to think of, for
my own sake and the sake of all mankind.'

But, they will say, you must not take these words to the letter; man
is so unlike God, and God so unlike man, that God's attributes must
be quite different from man's.  When you read of God's love,
justice, anger, and so forth, you must not think that they are
anything like man's love, man's justice, man's anger; but something
quite different, not only in degree, but in kind:  so that what
might be unjust and cruel in man, would not be so in God.

My dear friends, beware of that doctrine; for out of it have sprung
half the fanaticism and superstition which has disgraced and
tormented the earth.  Beware of ever thinking that a wrong thing
would be right if God did it, and not you.  And mind, that is flatly
contrary to the letter of the Bible.  In that grand text where
Abraham pleads with God, what does he say?  Not, 'Of course if Thou
choosest to do it, it must be right,' but 'Shall not the Judge of
all the earth do RIGHT?'  Abraham actually refers the Almighty God
to his own law; and asserts an eternal rule of right and wrong
common to man and to God, which God will surely never break.

Answer:  'If that doctrine be true, which I will never believe, then
the Bible mocks and deceives poor miserable sinful man, instead of
teaching him.  If God's love does not mean real actual love,--God's
anger, actual anger,--God's forgiveness, real forgiveness,--God's
justice, real justice,--God's truth, real truth,--God's
faithfulness, real faithfulness, what do they mean?  Nothing which I
can understand, nothing which I can trust in.  How can I trust in a
God whom I cannot understand or know?  How can I trust in a love or
a justice which is not what _I_ call love or justice, or anything
like them?

'The saints of old said, _I_ KNOW in whom I have believed.  And how
can I believe in him, if there is nothing in him which I can know;
nothing which is like man--nothing, to speak plainly, like Christ,
who was perfect man as well as perfect God?  If that be so, if man
can know nothing really of God, he is indeed most miserable of all
the beasts of the field, for I will warrant that he can know nothing
really of anything else.  And what is left for him, but to remain
for this life, and the life to come, in the outer darkness of
ignorance and confusion, misrule and misery, wherein is most
literally--as one may see in the history of every heathen nation
upon earth--wailing and gnashing of teeth.

'If God's goodness be not like man's goodness, there is no rule of
morality left, no eternal standard of right and wrong.  How can I
tell what I ought to do; or what God expects of me; or when I am
right and when I am wrong, if you take from me the good, plain, old
Bible rule, that man CAN be, and MUST be, like God?  The Bible rule
is, that everything good in man must be exactly like something good
in God, because it is inspired into him by the Spirit of God
himself.  Our Lord Jesus, who spoke, not to philosophers or Scribes
and Pharisees, but to plain human beings, weeping and sorrowing,
suffering and sinning, like us,--told them to be perfect, as our
Father in heaven is perfect, by being good to the unthankful and the
evil.  And if man is to be perfect, as his Father in heaven is
perfect, then his Father in heaven is perfect as man ought to be
perfect.  He told us to be merciful as our Father in heaven is
merciful.  Then our Father in heaven is merciful with the same sort
of mercy as we ought to show.  We are bidden to forgive others, even
as God for Christ's sake has forgiven us:  then if our forgiveness
is to be like God's, God's forgiveness is like ours.  We are to be
true, because God is true:  just, because God is just.  How can we
be that, if God's truth is not like what men call truth, God's
justice not like what men call justice?

'If I give up that rule of right and wrong, I give up all rules of
right and wrong whatsoever.'

No, my friends; if we will seek for God where he may be found, then
we shall know God, whom truly to know is everlasting life.  But we
must not seek for him where he is not, in long words and notions of
philosophy spun out of men's brains, and set up as if they were real
things, when words and notions they are, and words and notions they
will remain.  We must look for God where he is to be found, in the
character of his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, who alone has
revealed and unveiled God's character, because he is the brightness
of God's glory, and the express image of his person.

What Christ's character was we can find in the Holy Gospels; and we
can find it too, scattered and in parts, in all the good, the holy,
the noble, who have aught of Christ's spirit and likeness in them.

Whatsoever is good and beautiful in any human soul, that is the
likeness of Christ.  Whatsoever thoughts, words, or deeds are true,
honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report; whatsoever is true
virtue, whatsoever is truly worthy of praise, that is the likeness
of Christ; the likeness of him who was full of all purity, all
tenderness, all mercy, all self-sacrifice, all benevolence, all
helpfulness; full of all just and noble indignation also against
oppressors and hypocrites who bound heavy burdens and grievous to be
borne, but touched them not themselves with one of their fingers;
who kept the key of knowledge, and neither entered in themselves, or
let those who were trying enter in either.

The likeness of an all-noble, all-just, all-gracious, all-wise, all-
good human being; that is the likeness of Christ, and that,
therefore, is the likeness of God who made heaven and earth.

All-good; utterly and perfectly good, in every kind of goodness
which we have ever seen, or can ever imagine--that, thank God, is
the likeness and character of Almighty God, in whom we live and
move, and have our being.  To know that he is that--all-good, is to
know his character as far as sinful and sorrowful man need know; and
is not that to know enough?

The mystery of the ever-blessed Trinity, as set forth so admirably
in the Athanasian Creed, is a mystery; and it we cannot KNOW--we can
only believe it, and take it on trust:  but the CHARACTER of the
ever-blessed Trinity--Father, Son, and Holy Ghost--we can know:
while by keeping the words of the Athanasian Creed carefully in
mind, we may be kept from many grievous and hurtful mistakes which
will hinder our knowing it.  We can know that they are all good, for
such as the Father is such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost.
That goodness is their one and eternal substance, and majesty, and
glory, which we must not divide by fancying with some, that the
Father is good in one way and the Son in another.  That their
goodness is eternal and unchangeable; for they themselves are
eternal, and have neither parts nor passions.  That their goodness
is incomprehensible, that is, cannot be bounded or limited by time
or space, or by any notions or doctrines of ours, for they
themselves are incomprehensible, and able to do abundantly more than
we can ask or think.

This is our God, the God of the Bible, the God of the Church, the
God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ our Lord.  And him we
can believe utterly, for we know that he is faithful and true; and
we know what THAT means, if there is any truth or faithfulness in
us.  We know that he is just and righteous; and we know what THAT
means, if there is any justice and uprightness in ourselves.  Him we
can trust utterly; to him we can take all our cares, all our
sorrows, all our doubts, all our sins, and pour them out to him,
because he is condescending; and we know what THAT means, if there
be any condescension and real high-mindedness in ourselves.  We can
be certain too that he will hear us, just because he is so great, so
majestic, so glorious; because his greatness, and majesty, and glory
is a moral and spiritual greatness, which shows itself by stooping
to the meanest, by listening to the most foolish, helping the
weakest, pitying the worst, even while it is bound to punish.  Him
we can trust, I say, because him we can know, and can say of him,
Let the Infinite and the Absolute mean what they may, I know in whom
I have believed--God the Good.  Whatever else I cannot understand, I
can at least 'understand the lovingkindness of the Lord;' however
high his dwelling may be, I know that he humbleth himself to behold
the things in heaven and earth, to take the simple out of the dust,
and the poor out of the mire.  Whatever else God may or may not be,
I know that gracious is the Lord, and righteous, yea, our God is
merciful.  The Lord preserveth the simple, for _I_ was in misery,
and he helped ME.  Whatsoever fine theories or new discoveries I
cannot trust, I can trust him, for with him is mercy, and with the
Lord is plenteous redemption; and he shall redeem his people from
all their sins.  However dark and ignorant I may be, I can go to him
for teaching, and say, Teach me to do the thing that pleaseth thee,
for thou art my God; let thy loving Spirit lead me forth into the
land of righteousness.

The land of righteousness.  The one true heavenly land, wherein God
the righteous dwelleth from eternity to eternity, righteous in all
his ways, and holy in all his works, and therefore adorable in all
his ways, and glorious in all his works, with a glory even greater
than the glory of his Almighty power.  On that glory of his goodness
we can gaze, though afar off in degree, yet near in kind, while the
glory of his wisdom and power is far, far beyond my understanding.
Of the intellect of God we can know nothing; but we can know what is
better, the heart of God.  For THAT glory of goodness we can
understand, and KNOW, and sympathize with in our heart of hearts,
and say, If THIS be the likeness of God, he is indeed worthy to be
worshipped, and had in honour.  Praise the Lord, O my soul, for the
Lord is GOOD.  Kings and all people, princes and all judges of the
world, young men and maidens, old men and children, praise the name
of the Lord, for his name only is excellent, because his name is
GOOD.  Lift up your eyes, and look upon the face of Christ the God-
man, crucified for you; and behold therein the truth of all truths,
the doctrine of all doctrines, the gospel of all gospels, that the
'Unknown,' and 'Infinite,' and 'Absolute' God, who made the
universe, bids you know him, and know this of him, that he is GOOD,
and that his express image and likeness is--Jesus Christ, his Son,
our Lord.



SERMON III.  THE VOICE OF THE LORD GOD



(Preached also at the Chapel Royal, St. James, Sexagesima Sunday.)

GENESIS iii. 8.  And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in
the garden in the cool of the day.

These words would startle us, if we heard them for the first time.
I do not know but that they may startle us now, often as we have
heard them, if we think seriously over them.  That God should appear
to mortal man, and speak with mortal man.  It is most wonderful.  It
is utterly unlike anything that we have ever seen, or that any
person on earth has seen, for many hundred years.  It is a miracle,
in every sense of the word.

When one compares man as he was then, weak and ignorant, and yet
seemingly so favoured by God, so near to God, with man as he is now,
strong and cunning, spreading over the earth and replenishing it;
subduing it with railroads and steamships, with agriculture and
science, and all strange and crafty inventions, and all the while
never visited by any Divine or heavenly appearance, but seemingly
left utterly to himself by God, to go his own way and do his own
will upon the earth, one asks with wonder, Can we be Adam's
children?  Can the God who appeared to Adam, be our God likewise, or
has God's plan and rule for teaching man changed utterly?

No.  He is one God; the same God yesterday, to-day, and for ever.
His will and purpose, his care and rule over man, have not changed.

That is a matter of faith.  Of the faith which the holy Church
commands us to have.  But it need not be a blind or unreasonable
faith.  That our God is the God of Adam; that the same Lord God who
taught him teaches us likewise, need not be a mere matter of faith:
it may be a matter of reason likewise; a thing which seems
reasonable to us, and recommends itself to our mind and conscience
as true.

Consider, my friends, a babe when it comes into the world.  The
first thing of which it is aware is its mother's bosom.  The first
thing which it does, as its eyes and ears are gradually opened to
this world, is to cling to its parents.  It holds fast by their
hand, it will not leave their side.  It is afraid to sleep alone, to
go alone.  To them it looks up for food and help.  Of them it asks
questions, and tries to learn from them, to copy them, to do what it
sees them doing, even in play; and the parents in return lavish care
and tenderness on it, and will not let it out of their sight.  But
after a while, as the child grows, the parents will not let it be so
perpetually with them.  It must go to school.  It must see its
parents only very seldom, perhaps it must be away from them weeks or
months.  And why?  Not that the parents love it less:  but that it
must learn to take care of itself, to act for itself, to think for
itself, or it will never grow up to be a rational human being.

And the parting of the child from the parents does not break the
bond of love between them.  It learns to love them even better.
Neither does it break the bond of obedience.  The child is away from
its parents' eye.  But it learns to obey them behind their back; to
do their will of its own will; to ask itself, What would my parents
wish me to do, were they here? and so learns, if it will think of
it, a more true, deep, honourable and spiritual obedience, than it
ever would if its parents were perpetually standing over it, saying,
Do this, and do that.

In after life, that child may settle far away from his father's
home.  He may go up into the temptations and bustle of some great
city.  He may cross to far lands beyond the sea.  But need he love
his parents less? need the bond between them be broken, though he
may never set eyes on them again?  God forbid.  He may be settled
far away, with children, business, interests of his own; and yet he
may be doing all the while his father's will.  The lessons of God
which he learnt at his mother's knee may be still a lamp to his feet
and a light to his path.  Amid all the bustle and labour of
business, his father's face may still be before his eyes, his
father's voice still sound in his ears, bidding him be a worthy son
to him still; bidding him not to leave that way wherein he should
go, in which his parents trained him long, long since.  He may feel
that his parents are near him in the spirit, though absent in the
flesh.  Yes, though they may have passed altogether out of this
world, they may be to him present and near at hand; and he may be
kept from doing many a wrong thing and encouraged to do many a right
one, by the ennobling thought, My father would have had it so, my
mother would have had it so, had they been here on earth.  And
though in this world he may never see them again, he may look
forward steadily and longingly to the day when, this life's battle
over, he shall meet again in heaven those who gave him life on
earth.

My friends, if this be the education which is natural and necessary
from our earthly parents, made in God's image, appointed by God's
eternal laws for each of us, why should it not be the education
which God himself has appointed for mankind?  All which is truly
human (not sinful or fallen) is an image and pattern of something
Divine.  May not therefore the training which we find, by the very
facts of nature, fit and necessary for our children, be the same as
God's training, by which he fashioneth the hearts of the children of
men?  Therefore we can believe the Bible when it tells us that so it
is.  That God began the education of man by appearing to him
directly, keeping him, as it were, close to his hand, and teaching
him by direct and open revelation.  That as time went on, God left
men more and more to themselves outwardly:  but only that he might
raise their minds to higher notions of religion--that he might make
them live by faith, and not merely by sight; and obey him of their
own hearty free will, and not merely from fear or wonder.  And
therefore, in these days, when miraculous appearances have, as far
as we know, entirely ceased, yet God is not changed.  He is still as
near as ever to men; still caring for them, still teaching them; and
his very stopping of all miracles, so far from being a sign of God's
anger or neglect, is a part of his gracious plan for the training of
his Church.

For consider--Man was first put upon this earth, with all things
round him new and strange to him; seeing himself weak and unarmed
before the wild beasts of the forest, not even sheltered from the
cold, as they are; and yet feeling in himself a power of mind, a
cunning, a courage, which made him the lord of all the beasts by
virtue of his MIND, though they were stronger than he in body.  All
that we read of Adam and Eve in the Bible is, as we should expect,
the history of CHILDREN--children in mind, even when they were full-
grown in stature.  Innocent as children, but, like children, greedy,
fanciful, ready to disobey at the first temptation, for the very
silliest of reasons; and disobeying accordingly.  Such creatures--
with such wonderful powers lying hid in them, such a glorious future
before them; and yet so weak, so wilful, so ignorant, so unable to
take care of themselves, liable to be destroyed off the face of the
earth by their own folly, or even by the wild beasts around--surely
they needed some special and tender care from God to keep them from
perishing at the very outset, till they had learned somewhat how to
take care of themselves, what their business and duty were upon this
earth.  They needed it before they fell; they needed it still more,
and their children likewise, after they fell:  and if they needed
it, we may trust God that he afforded it to them.

But again.  Whence came this strange notion, which man alone has of
all the living things which we see, of RELIGION?  What put into the
mind of man that strange imagination of beings greater than himself,
whom he could not always see, but who might appear to him?  What put
into his mind the strange imagination that these unseen beings were
more or less his masters?  That they had made laws for him which he
must obey?  That he must honour and worship them, and do them
service, in order that they might be favourable to him, and help,
and bless, and teach him?  All nations except a very few savages
(and we do not know but that their forefathers had it like the rest
of mankind) have had some such notion as this; some idea of
religion, and of a moral law of right and wrong.

Where did they get it?

Where, I ask again, did they get it?

My friends, after much thought I answer, there is no explanation of
that question so simple, so rational, so probable, as the one which
the text gives.

"And they heard the voice of the Lord God."

Some, I know, say that man thought out for himself, in his own
reason, the notion of God; that he by searching found out God.  But
surely that is contrary to all experience.  Our experience is, that
men left to themselves forget God; lose more and more all thought of
God, and the unseen world; believe more and more in nothing but what
they can see and taste and handle, and become as the beasts that
perish.  How then did man, who now is continually forgetting God,
contrive to remember God for himself at first?  How, unless God
himself showed himself to man?  I know some will say, that mankind
invented for themselves false gods at first, and afterwards cleared
and purified their own notions, till they discovered the true God.
My friends, there is a homely old proverb which will well apply
here.  If there had been no gold guineas, there would be no brass
ones.  If men had not first had a notion of a true God, and then
gradually lost it, they would not have invented false gods to supply
his place.  And whence did they get, I ask again, the notion of gods
at all?  The simplest answer is in the Bible:  God taught them.  I
can find no better.  I do not believe a better will ever be found.

And why not?

Why not?  I ask.  To say that God cannot appear to men is simply
silly; for it is limiting God's Almighty power.  He that made man
and all heaven and earth, cannot he show himself to man, if he shall
so please?  To say that God will not appear to man because man is so
insignificant, and this earth such a paltry little speck in the
heavens, is to limit God's goodness; nay, it is to show that a man
knows not what goodness means.  What grace, what virtue is there
higher than condescension?  Then if God be, as he is, perfectly
good, must he not be perfectly condescending--ready and willing to
stoop to man, and all the more ready and the more willing, the more
weak, ignorant, and sinful this man is?  In fact, the greater need
man has of God, the more certain is it that God will help him in
that need.

Yes, my friends, the Bible is the revelation of a God who
condescends to men, and therefore descends to men.  And the more a
man's reason is spiritually enlightened to know the meaning of
goodness and holiness and justice and love, the more simple,
reasonable, and credible will it seem to him that God at first
taught men in the days of their early ignorance, by the only method
by which (as far as we can conceive) he could have taught them about
himself; namely, by appearing in visible shape, or speaking with
audible voice; and just as reasonable and credible, awful and
unfathomable mystery though it is, will be the greater news, that
that same Lord at last so condescended to man that he was conceived
by the Holy Ghost; born of the Virgin Mary; suffered under Pontius
Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried; and rose the third day, and
ascended into heaven.  Credible and reasonable, not indeed to the
natural man who looks only at nature, which he can see and hear and
handle; but credible and reasonable enough to the spiritual man,
whose mind has been enlightened by the Spirit of God, to see that
the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not
seen are eternal; even justice and love, mercy and condescension,
the divine order, and the kingdom of the Living God.

And now one word on a matter which is tormenting the minds of many
just now.  It is often said that all that I have been saying is
contrary to science.  That this science and understanding of the
world around us, which has improved so marvellously in our days,
proves that the apparitions and miracles spoken of in the Bible
cannot be true; that God, or the angels of God, can never have
walked with man in visible shape.

Now, my friends, I do not believe this.  I believe the very
contrary.  I entreat you to set your minds at rest on this point;
and to believe (what is certainly true) there is nothing in this new
science to contradict the good old creed, that the Lord God of old
appeared to his human children.  It would take too much time, of
course, to give you my reasons for saying this:  and I must
therefore ask you to take on trust from me when I tell you solemnly
and earnestly that there is nothing in modern science which can, if
rightly understood, contradict the glorious words of St. Paul, that
God at sundry times and in divers manners spake to the fathers by
the prophets, and hath at last spoken unto us by a Son, whom he hath
appointed heir of all things:  by whom also he made the worlds, who
is the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person,
and upholdeth all things by the word of his power:  even Jesus
Christ, God blessed for ever.  Amen.

What then shall we think of these things?  Shall we say, 'How much
better off were our forefathers than we!  Ah, that we were not left
to ourselves!  Ah, that we lived in the good old times when God and
his angels walked with men!'

My friends, what says Solomon the Wise?--'Inquire not why the former
times were better than these, for thou dost not inquire wisely
concerning this.'

It is very natural for us to think that we could become more easily
good men, more certain of going to heaven, if we saw divine
apparitions and heard divine voices.  A very natural thought.  But
natural things are not always the best or wisest things.  Spiritual
things are surely higher and deeper than natural things.  It is
natural to wish to see Christ, or some heavenly being, with our
natural eyes and senses.  But it is spiritual and therefore better
for our souls, to be content to see him by faith, with the spiritual
eyes of our heart and mind, to love him with all our heart and mind
and soul, to worship him, to put our whole trust in him, to call
upon him, to honour his holy name and his word, and to serve him
truly all the days of our life.

Natural, indeed, to wish that we were back again in the old times.
But we must recollect that these old times were not good times, but
bad times, and for that very reason the Lord took pity on them.
That they were times of darkness, and therefore it was that the
people who sat in great darkness, and in the valley of the shadow of
death, were allowed to see a great light.  And that after that, the
fulness of time, the very time which the Lord chose that he might be
incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and came down upon this earth in human
form, was not a good time.  On the contrary, the fulness of time,
1863 years ago, was the very wickedest, most faithless, most unjust
time that the world had ever seen--a time of which St. Paul said
that there were none who did good, no, not one; that adders' poison
was under all lips, and all feet swift to shed blood, and that the
way of peace none had known.

Better, far better, to live in times like these, in which there is
(among Christian nations at least) no great darkness, even though
there be no great light; times in which the knowledge of the true
God and his Son Jesus Christ is spreading, slowly but surely, over
all the earth; and with it, the fruit of the knowledge of the Lord,
justice, mercy, charity, fellow-feeling, and a desire to teach and
improve all mankind, such as the world never saw before.  These are
the fruits of the Scriptures of the Lord, and the Sacraments of the
Lord, and of the Holy Spirit of the Lord; and if that Holy Spirit be
in our hearts, and we yield our hearts to his gracious motions and
obey them, then we are really nearer to the Lord Jesus Christ than
if we saw him, as Adam did, with our bodily eyes, and yet rebelled
against him, as Adam did, in our hearts, and disobeyed him in our
actions.  Of old the Lord treated men as babes, and showed himself
to their bodily eyes, that so they might learn that he was, and that
he was near them.  But us he treats as grown men, who know that he
is, and that he is with us to the end of the world.  And if he
treats us as men, my friends, let us behave ourselves like men, and
not like silly children, who cannot be trusted by themselves for a
moment lest they do wrong or come to harm.  Let us obey God, not
with eye-service, just as long as we fancy that his eye is on us,
but with the deeper, more spiritual, more honourable obedience of
faith.  Let us obey him for obedience' sake, and honour him for very
honour's sake, as the young emigrant in foreign lands obeys and
honours the parents whom he will never see again on earth; and let
us look forward, like him, to the day when him whom we cannot see on
earth we may, perhaps, be permitted to see in heaven, as the reward-
-and for what higher reward can man wish?--of faith and obedience.



SERMON IV.  NOAH'S FLOOD



(Quinquagesima Sunday.)

GENESIS ix. 13.  I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a
token of a covenant between me and the earth.

We all know the history of Noah's flood.  What have we learnt from
that history?  What were we intended to learn from it?  What
thoughts should we have about it?

There are many thoughts which we may have.  We may think how the
flood came to pass; what means God used to make it rain forty days;
what is meant by breaking up the fountains of the great deep.  We
may calculate how large the ark was; and whether the Bible really
means that it held all kinds of living things in the world, or only
those of Noah's own country, or the animals which had been tamed and
made useful to man.  We may read long arguments as to whether the
flood spread over the whole world, or only over the country where
Noah and the rest of the sons of Adam then lived.  We may puzzle
ourselves concerning the rainbow of which the text speaks.  How it
was to be a sign of a covenant from God.  Whether man had ever seen
a rainbow before.  Whether there had ever been rain before in Noah's
country; or whether he did not live in that land of which the second
chapter of Genesis says that the Lord had not caused it to rain upon
the earth, but there went up a mist from the earth and watered the
face of the ground, as it does still in that high land in the centre
of Asia, in which old traditions put the garden of Eden, and from
which, as far as we yet know, mankind came at the beginning.

We may puzzle our minds with these and a hundred more curious
questions, as learned men have done in all ages.  But--shall we
become really the wiser by so doing?  More learned we may become.
But being learned and being wise are two different things.  True
wisdom is that which makes a man a better man.  And will such
puzzling questions and calculations as these, settle them how we
may, make us BETTER men?  Will they make us more honest and just,
more generous and loving, more able to keep our tempers and control
our appetites?  I cannot see that.  Will it make us better men
merely to know that there was once a flood of waters on the earth?
I cannot see that.  If we look at the hills of sand and gravel round
us, a little common sense will show us that there have been many
floods of waters on the earth, long, long before the one of which
the Bible speaks:  but shall we be better men for knowing that
either?  I cannot see why we should.  Now the Bible was sent to make
us better men.  How then will the history of the flood do that?

Easily enough, my friends, if we will listen to the Bible, and
thinking less about the flood itself, think more about him who, so
the Bible tells us, sent the flood.

The Bible, I have told you, is the revelation of the living Lord
God, even Jesus Christ; who, in his turn, reveals to us the Father.
And what we have to think of is, how does this story of the flood
reveal, unveil to us the living Lord of the world, and his living
government thereof?  Let us look at the matter in that way, instead
of puzzling ourselves with questions of words and endless
genealogies which minister strife.  Let us look at the matter in
that way, instead of (like too many men now, and too many men in all
ages) being so busy in picking to pieces the shell of the Bible,
that we forget that the Bible has any kernel, and so let it slip
through our hands.  Let us look at the matter in that way, as a
revelation of the living God, and then we shall find the history of
the flood full of godly doctrine, and profitable for these times,
and for all times whatsoever.

God sent a flood on the earth.

True; but the important matter is that GOD sent it.

God set the rainbow in the cloud, for a token.

True; but the important matter is that GOD set it there.

Important?  Yes.  What more important than to know that the flood
did not come of itself, that the rainbow did not come of itself, and
therefore that no flood comes of itself, no rainbow comes of itself;
nothing comes of itself, but all comes straight and immediately from
the one Living Lord God?

A man may say, But the flood must have been caused by clouds and
rain; and there must have been some special natural cause for their
falling at that place and that time?

What of that?

Or that the fountains of the great deep must have been broken up by
natural earthquakes, such as break up the crust of the earth now.
What of that?

Or that the rainbow must have been caused by the sun's rays shining
through rain-drops at a certain angle, as all rainbows are now.
What of that?  Very probably it was:  but if not, What of that?
What we ought to know, and what we ought to care for is, what the
Bible tells us without a doubt, that however they came, God sent
them.  However they were made, God made them.  Their manner, their
place, their time was appointed exactly by God for a MORAL purpose.
To do something for the immortal souls of men; to punish sinners; to
preserve the righteous; to teach Noah and his children after him a
moral lesson, concerning righteousness and sin; concerning the wrath
of God against sin; concerning God, that he governs the world and
all in it, and does not leave the world, or mankind, to go on of
themselves and by themselves.

You see, I trust, what a message this was, and is, and ever will be
for men; what a message and good news it must have been especially
for the heathen of old time.

For what would the heathen, what actually did the heathen think
about such sights as a flood, or a rainbow?

They thought of course that some one sent the flood.  Common sense
taught them that.

But what kind of person must he be, thought they, who sent the
flood?  Surely a very dark, terrible, angry God, who was easily and
suddenly provoked to drown their cattle and flood their lands.

But the rainbow, so bright and gay, the sign of coming fine weather,
could not belong to the same God who made the flood.  What the
fancies of the heathen about the rainbow were matters little to us:
but they fancied, at least, that it belonged to some cheerful,
bright and kind God.  And so with other things.  Whatever was
bright, and beautiful, and wholesome in the world, like the rainbow,
belonged to kind gods; whatever was dark, ugly, and destroying, like
the flood, belonged to angry gods.

Therefore those of the heathen who were religious never felt
themselves safe.  They were always afraid of having offended some
god, they knew not how; always afraid of some god turning against
them, and bringing diseases against their bodies; floods, drought,
blight against their crops; storms against their ships, in revenge
for some slight or neglect of theirs.

And all the while they had no clear notion that these gods made the
world; they thought that the gods were parts of the world, just as
men are, and that beyond the gods there was the some sort of Fate,
or necessity, which even gods must obey.

Do you not see now what a comfort--what a spring of hope, and
courage, and peace of mind, and patient industry--it must have been
to the men of old time to be told, by this story of the flood, that
the God who sends the flood sends the rainbow also?  There are not
two gods, nor many gods, but one God, of whom are all things.  Light
and darkness, storm or sunshine, barrenness or wealth, come alike
from him.  Diseases, storm, flood, blight, all these show that there
is in God an awfulness, a sternness, an anger if need be--a power of
destroying his own work, of altering his own order; but sunshine,
fruitfulness, peace, and comfort, all show that love and mercy,
beauty and order, are just as much attributes of his essence as
awfulness and anger.

They tell us he is a God whose will is to love, to bless, to make
his creatures happy, if they will allow him.  They tell us that his
anger is not a capricious, revengeful, proud, selfish anger, such as
that of the heathen gods:  but that it is an orderly anger, a just
anger, a loving anger, and therefore an anger which in its wrath can
remember mercy.  Out of God's wrath shineth love, as the rainbow out
of the storm; if it repenteth him that he hath made man, it is only
because man is spoiling and ruining himself, and wasting the gifts
of the good world by his wickedness.  If he see fit to destroy man
out of the earth, he will destroy none but those who deserve and
need destroying.  He will save those whom, like Noah, he can trust
to begin afresh, and raise up a better race of men to do his work in
the world.  If God send a flood to destroy all living things, any
when or anywhere, he will show, by putting the rainbow in the cloud,
that floods and destruction and anger are not his rule; that his
rule is sunshine, and peace, and order; that though he found it
necessary once to curse the ground, once to sweep away a wicked race
of men, yet that even that was, if one dare use the words of God,
against his gracious will; that his will was from the beginning,
peace on earth, and not floods, and good will to men, and not
destruction; and that in his HEART, in the abyss of his essence, and
of which it is written, that God is Love--in his heart I say, he
said, 'I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake,
even though the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth.
Neither will I again smite everything living, as I have done.  While
the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, summer and winter, and
day and night, shall not cease.'

This is the God which the book of Genesis goes on revealing and
unveiling to us more and more--a God in whom men may TRUST.

The heathen could not trust their gods.  The Bible tells men of a
God whom they can trust.  That is just the difference between the
Bible and all other books in the world.  But what a difference!
Difference enough to make us say, Sooner that every other book in
the world were lost, and the Bible preserved, than that we should
lose the Bible, and with the Bible lose faith in God.

And now, my friends, what shall we learn from this?

What shall we learn?  Have we not learnt enough already?  If we have
learnt something more of who God is; if we have learnt that he is a
God in whom we can trust through joy and sorrow, through light and
darkness, through life and death, have we not learnt enough for
ourselves?  Yes, if even those poor and weak words about God which I
have just spoken, could go home into all your hearts, and take root,
and bear fruit there, they would give you a peace of mind, a
comfort, a courage among all the chances and changes of this mortal
life, and a hope for the life to come, such as no other news which
man can tell you will ever give.  But there is one special lesson
which we may learn from the history of the flood, of which I may as
well tell you at once.  The Bible account of the flood will teach us
how to look at the many terrible accidents, as we foolishly call
them, which happen still upon this earth.  There are floods still,
here and there, earthquakes, fires, fearful disasters, like that
great colliery disaster of last year, which bring death, misery and
ruin to thousands.  The Bible tells us what to think of them, when
it tells us of the flood.

Do I mean that these disasters come as punishments to the people who
are killed by them?  That is exactly what I do not mean.  It was
true of the flood.  It is true, no doubt, in many other cases.  But
our blessed Lord has specially forbidden us to settle when it is
true to say that any particular set of people are destroyed for
their sins:  forbidden us to say that the poor creatures who perish
in this way are worse than their neighbours.

'Thinkest thou,' he says, 'that those Galilaeans whose blood Pilate
mingled with their sacrifices, were sinners above all the
Galilaeans?  Or those eighteen, on whom the tower in Siloam fell,
and killed them; think you that they were sinners above all who
dwelt in Jerusalem?  I tell you nay.'

'Judge not,' he says, 'and ye shall not be judged,' and therefore we
must not judge.  We have no right to say, for instance, that the
terrible earthquake in Italy, two years ago, came as a punishment
for the sins of the people.  We have no right to say that the twenty
or thirty thousand human beings, with innocent children among them
by hundreds, who were crushed or swallowed up by that earthquake in
a few hours, were sinners above all that dwelt in Italy.  We must
not say that, for the Lord God himself has forbidden it.

But this we may say (for God himself has said it in the Bible), that
these earthquakes, and all other disasters, great or small, do not
come of themselves--do not come by accident, or chance, or blind
necessity; but that he sends them, and that they fulfil his will and
word.  He sends them, and therefore they do not come in vain.  They
fulfil his will, and his will is a good will.  They carry out his
purpose, but his purpose is a gracious purpose.  God may send them
in anger; but in his anger he remembers mercy, and his very wrath to
some is part and parcel of his love to the rest.  Therefore these
disasters must be meant to do good, and will do good to mankind.
They may be meant to teach men, to warn them, to make them more wise
and prudent for the future, more humble and aware of their own
ignorance and weakness, more mindful of the frailty of human life,
that remembering that in the midst of life we are in death, they may
seek the Lord while he may be found, and call upon him while he is
near.  They may be meant to do that, and to do a thousand things
more.  For God's ways are not as our ways, or his thoughts as our
thoughts.  His ways are unsearchable, and his paths past finding
out.  Who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him,
or even settle what the Lord means by doing this or that?

All we can say is--and that is a truly blessed thing to be able to
say--that floods and earthquakes, fire and storms, come from the
Lord whose name is Love; the same Lord who walked with Adam in the
garden, who brought the children of Israel out of Egypt, who was
born on earth of the Virgin Mary, who shed his life-blood for sinful
man, who wept over Jerusalem even when he was about to destroy it so
that not one stone was left on another, and who, when he looked on
the poor little children of Judaea, untaught or mistaught, enslaved
by the Romans, and but too likely to perish or be carried away
captive in the fearful war which was coming on their land, said of
them, 'It is not the will of your Father in heaven, that one of
these little ones shall perish.'  Him at least we can trust, in the
dark and dreadful things of this world, as well as in the bright and
cheerful ones; and say with Job, 'Though he slay me, yet will I
trust in him.  I have received good from the hands of the Lord, and
shall I not receive evil?'



SERMON V.  ABRAHAM



(First Sunday in Lent)

GENESIS xvii.  1, 2.  And when Abram was ninety years old and nine,
the Lord appeared to Abram, and said unto him, I am the Almighty
God; walk before me, and be thou perfect.

I have told you that the Bible reveals, that is, unveils the Lord
God, Jesus Christ our Lord, and through him God the Father Almighty.
I have tried to show you how the Bible does so, step by step.  I go
on to show you another step which the Bible takes, and which
explains much that has gone before.

From whom did Moses and the holy men of old whom Moses taught get
their knowledge of God, the true God?

The answer seems to be--from Abraham.

God taught Moses more, much more than he taught Abraham.  It was
Moses who bade men call God Jehovah, the I AM; but who, hundreds of
years before, taught them to call him the Almighty God?

The answer seems to be, Abraham.  God, we read, appeared to Abraham,
and said to him, 'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy father's
house, unto a land that I shall show thee, and I will make of thee a
great nation.'  And again the Lord said to him, 'I am the Almighty
God, walk before me and be thou perfect, and thou shalt be a father
of many nations.'

'And Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for
righteousness.  And he was called the friend of God.'

But from what did Abraham turn to worship the living God?  From
idols?  We are not certain.  There is little or no mention of idols
in Abraham's time.  He worshipped, more probably, the host of
heaven, the sun and moon and stars.  So say the old traditions of
the Arabs, who are descended from Abraham through Ishmael, and so it
is most likely to have been.  That was the temptation in the East.
You read again and again how his children, the Jews, turned back
from God to worship the host of heaven; and that false worship seems
to have crept in at some very early time.  The sun, you must
remember, and the moon are far more brilliant and powerful in the
East than here; their power of doing harm or good to human beings
and to the crops of the land is far greater; while the stars shine
in the East with a brightness of which we here have no notion.  We
do not know, in this cloudy climate, what St. Paul calls the glory
of the stars; nor see how much one star differs from another star in
glory; and therefore here in the North we have never been tempted to
worship them as the Easterns were.  The sun, the moon, the stars,
were the old gods of the East, the Elohim, the high and mighty ones,
who ruled over men, over their good and bad fortunes, over the
weather, the cattle, the crops, sending burning drought, pestilence,
sun-strokes, and those moon-strokes which we never have here; but of
which the Psalmist speaks when he says, 'The sun shall not smite
thee by day, neither the moon by night.'  And them the old Easterns
worshipped in some wild confused way.

But to Abraham it was revealed that the sun, the moon, and the stars
were not Elohim--the high and mighty Ones.  That there was but one
Elohim, one high and mighty One, the Almighty maker of them all.  He
did not learn that, perhaps, at once.  Indeed the Bible tells us how
God taught him step by step, as he teaches all men, and revealed
himself to him again and again, till he had taught Abraham all that
he was to know.  But he did teach him this; as a beautiful old story
of the Arabs sets forth.  They say how (whether before or after God
called him, we cannot tell) Abraham at night saw a star:  and he
said, 'This is my Lord.'  But when the star set, he said, 'I like
not those who vanish away.'  And when he saw the moon rising, he
said, 'This is my Lord.'  But when the moon too set, he said,
'Verily, if my Lord direct me not in the right way, I shall be as
one who goeth astray.'  But when he saw the sun rising, he said,
'This is my Lord:  this is greater than star or moon.'  But the sun
went down likewise.  Then said Abraham, 'O my people, I am clear of
these things.  I turn my face to him who hath made the heaven and
the earth.'

And was this all that Abraham believed--that the sun and moon and
stars were not gods, but that there was a God besides, who had made
them all?  My friends, there have been thousands and tens of
thousands since, I fear, who have believed as much as that, and yet
who cannot call Abraham their spiritual father, who are not
justified by faith with faithful Abraham.

For merely to believe that, is a dead faith, which will never be
counted for righteousness, because it will never make man a
righteous man doing righteous and good deeds as Abraham did.

Of Abraham it is written, that what he knew, he did.  That his faith
wrought with his works.  And by his works his faith was made
perfect.  That when he gained faith in God, he went and acted on his
faith.  When God called him he went out, not knowing whither he
went.

His faith is only shown by his works.  Because he believed in God he
went and did things which he would not have done if he had not
believed in God.  Of him it is written, that he obeyed the voice of
the Lord, and kept his charge, his commandments, his statutes, and
his laws.

In a word, he had not merely found out that there was one God, but
that that one God was a good God, a God whom he must obey, and obey
by being a good man.  Therefore his faith was counted to him for
righteousness, because it was righteousness, and made him do
righteous deeds.

He believed that God was helping him; therefore he had no need to
oppress or overreach any man.  He believed that God's eye was on
him; therefore he dared not oppress or overreach any man.

His faith in God made him brave.  He went forth he knew not whither;
but he had put his trust in God, and he did not fear.  He and his
three hundred slaves, born in his house, were not afraid to set out
against the four Arab kings who had just conquered the five kings of
the vale of Jordan, and plundered the whole land.  Abraham and his
little party of faithful slaves follow them for miles, and fall on
them and defeat them utterly, setting the captives free, and
bringing back all the plunder; and then, in return for all that he
has done, Abraham will take nothing--not even, he says, 'a thread or
a shoe-latchet--lest men should say, We have made Abraham rich.'
And why?

Because his faith in God made him high-minded, generous, and
courteous; as when he bids Lot go whither he will with his flocks
and herds.  'Let there be no strife, I pray thee, between thee and
me.  If thou wilt take the left hand, I will go to the right.'  He
is then, as again with the king of Sodom, and with the three
strangers at the tent door, and with the children of Heth, when he
is buying the cave of Machpelah for a burying-place for Sarah--
always and everywhere the same courteous, self-restrained, high-
bred, high-minded man.

It has been said that true religion will make a man a more thorough
gentleman than all the courts in Europe.  And it is true:  you may
see simple labouring men as thorough gentlemen as any duke, simply
because they have learned to fear God; and fearing him, to restrain
themselves, and to think of other people more than of themselves,
which is the very root and essence of all good breeding.  And such a
man was Abraham of old--a plain man, dwelling in tents, helping to
tend his own cattle, fetching in the calf from the field himself,
and dressing it for his guests with his own hand; but still, as the
children of Heth said of him, a mighty prince--not merely in wealth
of flocks and herds, but a prince in manners and a prince in heart.

But faith in God did more for Abraham than this:  it made him a
truly pious man--it made him the friend of God.

There were others in Abraham's days who had some knowledge of the
one true God.  Lot his nephew, Abimelech, Aner, Eshcol, Mamre, and
others, seem to have known whom Abraham meant when he spoke of the
Almighty God.  But of Abraham alone it is said that he believed God;
that he trusted in God, and rested on him; was built up on God;
rested on God as a child in the mother's arms--for this we are told,
is the full meaning of the word in the Bible--and looked to God as
his shield and his exceeding great reward.  He trusted in God
utterly, and it was counted to him for righteousness.

And of Abraham alone it is said that he was the friend of God; that
God spoke with him, and he with God.  He first of all men of whom we
read, at least since the time of Adam, knew what communion with God
meant; knew that God spoke to him as a friend, a benefactor, a
preserver, who was teaching and training him with a father's love
and care; and felt that he in return could answer God, could open
his heart to him, tell him not only of his wants, but of his doubts
and fears.

Yes, we may almost say, on the strength of the Bible, that Abraham
was the first human being, as far as we know, who prayed with his
heart and soul; who knew what true prayer means--the prayer of the
heart, by which man draws near to God, and finds that God is near to
him.  This--this communion with God, is the especial glory of
Abraham's character.  This it is which has given him his name
through all generations, The friend of God.  Or, as his descendants
the Arabs call him to this day, simply, 'The Friend.'

This it is which gained him the name of the Father of the Faithful;
the father of all who believe, whether they be descended from him,
or whether they be, like us, of a different nation.  This it is
which has made a wise man say of Abraham, that if we will consider
what he knew and did, and in what a dark age he lived, we shall see
that Abraham may be (unless we except Moses) the greatest of mere
human beings--that the human race may owe more to him than to any
mortal man.

But why need we learn from Abraham? we who, being Christians, know
and believe the true faith so much more clearly than Abraham could
do.

Ah, my friends, it is easier to know than to believe, and easier to
know than to do.  Easier to talk of Abraham's faith than to have
Abraham's faith.  Easier to preach learned and orthodox sermons
about how Abraham was justified by his faith, than to be justified
ourselves by our own faith.

And say not in your hearts, 'It was easy for Abraham to believe God.
I should have believed of course in his place.  If God spoke to me,
of course I should obey him.'  My friends, there is no greater and
no easier mistake.  God has spoken to many a man who has not
believed him, neither obeyed him, and so he may to you.  God spoke
to Abraham, and he believed him and obeyed him.  And why?  Because
there was in Abraham's heart something which there is not in all
men's hearts--something which ANSWERED to God's call, and made him
certain that the call was from God--even the Holy Spirit of God.

So God may call you, and you may obey him, if only the Spirit of God
be in you; but not else.  MAY call you, did I say?  God DOES call
you and me, does speak to us, does command us, far more clearly than
he did Abraham.  We know the mystery of Christ, which in other ages
was NOT made known to the sons of men as it is now revealed to his
holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit.  God, who at sundry times
and in divers manners spoke to the fathers by the prophets, hath in
these last days spoken to us by his SON, Jesus Christ our Lord, and
told us our duty, and the reward which doing our duty will surely
bring, far more clearly than ever he did to Abraham.

But do we listen to him?  Do we say with Abraham, 'O my people, I am
clear of all these things which rise and set, which are born and
die, which begin and end in time, and turn my face to him that made
heaven and earth!'  If so, how is it that we see people everywhere
worshipping not idols of wood and stone, but other things, all
manner of things beside God, and saying, 'These are my Elohim.
These are the high and mighty ones whom I must obey.  These are the
strong things on which depend my fortune and my happiness.  I must
obey THEM first, and let plain doing right and avoiding wrong come
after as it can.'

One worships the laws of trade, and says, 'I know this and that is
hardly right; but it is in the way of business, and therefore I must
do it.'

One worships public opinion, and follows after the multitude to do
evil, doing what he knows is wrong, simply because others do it, and
it is the way of the world.

One worships the interest of his party, whether in religion or in
politics; and does for their sake mean and false, cruel and unjust
things, which he would not do for his own private interest.

Too many, even in a free country, worship great people, and put
their trust in princes, saying, 'I am sorry to have to do this.  I
know it is rather mean; but I must, or I shall lose such and such a
great man's interest and favour.'  Or, 'I know I cannot afford this
expense; but if I do not I shall not get into good society, and this
person and that will not ask me to his house.'

All, meanwhile, except a few, rich or poor, worship money; and
believe more or less, in spite of the Lord's solemn warning to the
contrary, that a man's life does consist in the abundance of the
things which he possesses.

These are the Elohim of this world, the high and mighty things to
which men turn for help instead of to the living God, who was before
all things, and will be after them; and behold they vanish away, and
where then are those that have put their trust in them?

But blessed is he whose trust is in God the Almighty, and whose hope
is in the Lord Jehovah, the eternal I Am.  Blessed is he who, like
faithful Abraham, says to his family, 'My people, I am clear of all
these things.  I turn my face from them to him who hath made earth
and heaven.  I go through this world like Abraham, not knowing
whither I go; but like Abraham, I fear not, for I go whither God
sends me.  I rest on God; he is my defence, and my exceeding great
reward.  To have known him, loved him, obeyed him, is reward enough,
even if I do not, as the world would say, succeed in life.
Therefore I long not for power and honour, riches and pleasure.  I
am content to do my duty faithfully in that station of life to which
God has called me, and to be forgiven for all my failings and
shortcomings for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord, and that is
enough for me; for I believe in my Father in heaven, and believe
that he knows best for me and for my children.  He has not promised
me, as he promised Abraham, to make of me a great nation; but he has
promised that the righteous man shall never be deserted, or his
children beg their bread.  He has promised to keep his covenant and
mercy to a thousand generations with those who keep his commandments
and do them; and that is enough for me.  In God have I put my trust,
and I will not fear what man, or earth, or heaven, or any created
thing can do unto me.'

Blessed is that man, whether he inherit honourably great estates
from his ancestors, or whether he make honourably great wealth and
station for himself; whether he spend his life quietly and honestly
in the country farm or in the village shop, or whether he simply
earn his bread from week to week by plough and spade.  Blessed is
he, and blessed are his children after him.  For he is a son of
Abraham; and of him God hath said, as of Abraham, 'I know him that
he will command his children and household after him, and they shall
keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgment, that the Lord
may bring on him the blessing which he has spoken.'

Yes; blessed is that man.  He has chosen his share of Abraham's
faith; and he and his children after him shall have their share of
Abraham's blessing.



SERMON VI.  JACOB AND ESAU



(Second Sunday in Lent.)

GENESIS xxv. 29-34.  And Jacob sod pottage:  and Esau came from the
field, and he was faint:  And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray
thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint:  therefore was his
name called Edom.  And Jacob said, Sell me this day thy birthright.
And Esau said, Behold, I am at the point to die:  and what profit
shall this birthright do to me?  And Jacob said, Swear to me this
day; and he sware unto him:  and he sold his birthright unto Jacob.
Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat
and drink, and rose up, and went his way:  thus Esau despised his
birthright.

I have been telling you of late that the Bible is the revelation of
God.  But how does the story of Jacob and Esau reveal God to us?
What further lesson concerning God do we learn therefrom?

I think that if we will take the story simply as it stands we shall
see easily enough.  For it is all simple and natural enough.  Jacob
and Esau, we shall see, were men of like passions with ourselves;
men as we are, mixed up of good and evil, sometimes right and
sometimes wrong:  and God rewarded them when they did right, and
punished them when they did wrong, just as he does with us now.

They were men, though, of very different characters:  we may see men
like them now every day round us.  Esau, we read, was a hunter--a
man of the field; a bold, fierce, active man; generous, brave, and
kind-hearted, as the end of his story shows:  but with just the
faults which such a man would have.  He was hasty, reckless, and
fond of pleasure; passionate too, and violent.  Have we not seen
just such men again and again, and liked them for what was good in
them, and been sorry too that they were not more sober and
reasonable, and true to themselves?

Jacob was the very opposite kind of man.  He was a plain man--what
we call a still, solid, prudent, quiet man--and a dweller in tents:
he lived peaceably, looking after his father's flocks and herds;
while Esau liked better the sport and danger of hunting wild beasts,
and bringing home venison to his father.

Now Jacob, we see, was of course a more thoughtful man than Esau.
He kept more quiet, and so had more time to think:  and he had
plainly thought a great deal over God's promise to his grandfather
Abraham.  He believed that God had promised Abraham that he would
make his seed as the sand of the sea for multitude, and give them
that fair land of Canaan, and that in his seed all the families of
the earth should be blessed; and that seemed to him, and rightly, a
very grand and noble thing.  And he set his heart on getting that
blessing for himself, and supplanting his elder brother Esau, and
being the heir of the promises in his stead.  Well--that was mean
and base and selfish perhaps:  but there is somewhat of an excuse
for Jacob's conduct, in the fact that he and Esau were twins; that
in one sense neither of them was older than the other.  And you must
recollect, that it was not at all a regular custom in the East for
the eldest son to be his father's heir, as it is in England.  You
find that few or none of the great kings of the Jews were eldest
sons.  The custom was not kept up as it is here.  So Jacob may have
said to himself, and not have been very wrong in saying it:

'I have as good a right to the birthright as Esau.  My father loves
him best because he brings him in venison; but I know the value of
the honour which is before my family.  Surely the one of us who
cares most about the birthright will be most fit to have it, and
ought to have it; and Esau cares nothing for it, while I do.'

So Jacob, in his cunning, bargaining way, took advantage of his
brother's weak, hasty temper, and bought his birthright of him, as
the text tells.

That story shows us what sort of a man Esau was:  hasty, careless,
fond of the good things of this life.  He had no reason to complain
if he lost his birthright.  He did not care for it, and so he had
thrown it away.  Perhaps he forgot what he had done; but his sin
found him out, as our sins are sure to find each of us out.  The day
came when he wanted his birthright and could not have it, and found
no place for repentance--that is, no chance of undoing what he had
done--though he sought it carefully with tears.  He had sown, and he
must reap; he had made his bed, and he must lie on it.  And so must
Jacob in his turn.

Now this, I think, is just what the story teaches us concerning God.
God chooses Abraham's family to grow into a great nation, and to be
a peculiar people.  The next question will be:  If God favours that
family, will he do unjust things to help them?--will he let them do
unjust things to help themselves?  The Bible answers positively, No.
God will not be unjust or arbitrary in choosing one man and
rejecting another.  If he chooses Jacob, it is because Jacob is fit
for the work which God wants done.  If he rejects Esau, it is
because Esau is not fit.

It is natural, I know, to pity poor Esau; but one has no right to do
more.  One has no right to fancy for a moment that God was arbitrary
or hard upon him.  Esau is not the sort of man to be the father of a
great nation, or of anything else great.  Greedy, passionate,
reckless people like him, without due feeling of religion or of the
unseen world, are not the men to govern the world, or help it
forward, or be of use to mankind, or train up their families in
justice and wisdom and piety.  If there had been no people in the
world but people like Esau, we should be savages at this day,
without religion or civilization of any kind.  They are of the
earth, earthy; dust they are, and unto dust they will return.  It is
men like Jacob whom God chooses--men who have a feeling of religion
and the unseen world; men who can look forward, and live by faith,
and form plans for the future--and carry them out too, against
disappointment and difficulty, till they succeed.

Look at one side of Jacob's character--his perseverance.  He serves
seven years for Rachel, because he loves her.  Then when he is
cheated, and Leah given him instead, he serves seven years more for
Rachel--'and they seemed to him a short time, for the love he bore
to her;' and then he serves seven years more for the flocks and
herds.  A slave, or little better than a slave, of his own free
will, for one-and-twenty years, to get what he wanted.  Those are
the men whom God uses, and whom God prospers.  Men with deep hearts
and strong wills, who set their minds on something which they cannot
see, and work steadfastly for it, till they get it; for God gives it
to them in good time--when patience has had her perfect work upon
their characters, and made them fit for success.

Esau, we find, got some blessing--the sort of blessing he was fit
for.  He loved his father, and he was rewarded.  'And Isaac his
father answered and said unto him, Behold, thy dwelling shall be the
fatness of the earth, and of the dew of heaven from above; and by
thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall
come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt
break his yoke from off thy neck.'

He was a brave, generous-hearted man, in spite of his faults.  He
was to live the free hunter's life which he loved; and we find that
he soon became the head of a wild powerful tribe, and his sons after
him.  Dukes of Edom they were called for several generations; but
they never rose to any solid and lasting power; they never became a
great nation, as Jacob's children did.  They were just what one
would expect--wild, unruly, violent people.  They have long since
perished utterly off the face of the earth.

And what did Jacob get, who so meanly bought the birthright, and
cheated his father out of the blessing?  Trouble in the flesh;
vanity and vexation of spirit.  He had to flee from his father's
house; never to see his mother again; to wander over the deserts to
kinsmen who cheated him as he had cheated others; to serve Laban for
twenty-one years; to crouch miserably in fear and trembling, as a
petitioner for his life before Esau whom he had wronged, and to be
made more ashamed than ever, by finding that generous Esau had
forgiven and forgotten all.  Then to see his daughter brought to
shame, his sons murderers, plotting against their own brother, his
favourite son; to see his grey hairs going down with sorrow to the
grave; to confess to Pharaoh, after one hundred and twenty years of
life, that few and evil had been the days of his pilgrimage.

Then did his faith in God win no reward?  Not so.  That was his
reward, to be chastened and punished, till his meanness was purged
out of him.  He had taken God for his guide; and God did guide him
accordingly; though along a very different path from what he
expected.  God accepted his faith, delivered his soul, gave him rest
and peace at last in his old age in Egypt, let him find his son
Joseph again in power and honour:  but all along God punished his
own inventions--as he will punish yours and mine, my friends, all
the while that he may be accepting our faith and delivering our
souls, because we trust in him.  So God rewarded Jacob by giving him
more light:  by not leaving him to himself, and his own darkness and
meanness, but opening his eyes to understand the wondrous things of
God's law, and showing him how God's law is everlasting, righteous,
not to be escaped by any man; how every action brings forth its
appointed fruit; how those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind.
Jacob's first notion was like the notion of the heathen in all
times, 'My God has a special favour for me, therefore I may do what
I like.  He will prosper me in doing wrong; he will help me to cheat
my father.'  But God showed him that that was just not what he would
do for him.  He would help and protect him; but only while he was
doing RIGHT.  God would not alter his moral laws for him or any man.
God would be just and righteous; and Jacob must be so likewise, till
he learnt to trust not merely in a God who happened to have a
special favour to him, but in the righteous God who loves justice,
and wishes to make men righteous even as he is righteous, and will
make them righteous, if they trust in him.

That was the reward of Jacob's faith--the best reward which any man
can have.  He was taught to know God, whom truly to know is
everlasting life.  And this, it seems to me, is the great revelation
concerning God which we learn from the history of Jacob and Esau.
That God, how much soever favour he may show to certain persons, is
still, essentially and always, a just God.

And now, my friends, if any of you are tempted to follow Jacob's
example, take warning betimes.  You will be tempted.  There are men
among you--there are in every congregation--who are, like Jacob,
sober, industrious, careful, prudent men, and fairly religious too;
men who have the good sense to see that Solomon's proverbs are true,
and that the way to wealth and prosperity is to fear God, and keep
his commandments.

May you prosper; may God's blessing be upon your labour; may you
succeed in life, and see your children well settled and thriving
round you, and go down to the grave in peace.

But never forget, my good friends, that you will be tempted as Jacob
was--to be dishonest.  I cannot tell why; but professedly religious
men, in all countries, in all religions, are, and always have been,
tempted in that way--to be mean and cunning and false at times.  It
is so, and there is no denying it:  when all other sins are shut out
from them by their religious profession, and their care for their
own character, and their fear of hell, the sin of lying, for some
strange reason, is left open to them; and to it they are tempted to
give way.  For God's sake--for the sake of Christ, who was full of
grace and truth--for your own sakes--struggle against that.  Unless
you wish to say at last with poor old Jacob, 'Few and evil have been
the days of my pilgrimage;' struggle against that.  If you fear God
and believe that he is with you, God will prosper your plans and
labour; but never make that an excuse for saying in your hearts,
like Jacob, 'God intends that I should have these good things;
therefore I may take them for myself by unfair means.'  The
birthright is yours.  It is you, the steady, prudent, God-fearing
ones, who will prosper on the earth, and not poor wild, hot-headed
Esau.  But do not make that an excuse for robbing and cheating Esau,
because he is not as thoughtful as you are.  The Lord made him as
well as you; and died for him as well as for you; and wills his
salvation as well as yours; and if you cheat him the Lord will
avenge him speedily.  If you give way to meanness, covetousness,
falsehood, as Jacob did, you will rue it; the Lord will enter into
judgment with you quickly, and all the more quickly because he loves
you.  Because there is some right in you--because you are on the
whole on the right road--the Lord will visit you with disappointment
and affliction, and make your own sins your punishment.

If you deceive other people, other people shall deceive you, as they
did Jacob.  If you lay traps, you shall fall into them yourselves,
as Jacob did.  If you fancy that because you trust in God, God will
overlook any sin in you, as Jacob did, you shall see, as Jacob did,
that your sin shall surely find you out.  The Lord will be more
sharp and severe with you than with Esau.  And why?  Because he has
given you more, and requires more of you; and therefore he will
chastise you, and sift you like wheat, till he has parted the wheat
from the tares.  The wheat is your faith, your belief that if you
trust in God he will prosper you, body and soul.  That is God's good
seed, which he has sown in you.  The tares are your fancies that you
may do wrong and mean things to help yourselves, because God has an
especial favour for you.  That is the devil's sowing, which God will
burn out of you by the fire of affliction, as he did out of Jacob,
and keep your faith safe, as good seed in his garner, for the use of
your children after you, that you may teach them to walk in God's
commandments and serve him in spirit and in truth.  For God is a God
of truth, and no liar shall stand in his sight, let him be never so
religious; he requires truth in the inward parts, and truth he will
have; and whom he loves he will chasten, as he chastened Jacob of
old, till he has made him understand that honesty is the best
policy; and that whatever false prophets may tell you, there is not
one law for the believer and another for the unbeliever; but
whatsoever a man sows, that shall he reap, and receive the due
reward of the deeds done in the body, whether they be good or evil.



SERMON VII.  JOSEPH



(Preached on the Sunday before the Wedding of the Prince of Wales.
March 8th, third Sunday in Lent.)

GENESIS xxxix. 9.  How can I do this great wickedness, and sin
against God?

The story of Joseph is one which will go home to all healthy hearts.
Every child can understand, every child can feel with it.  It is a
story for all men and all times.  Even if it had not been true, and
not real fact, but a romance of man's invention, it would have been
loved and admired by men; far more then, when we know that it is
true, that it actually did so happen; that is part and parcel of the
Holy Scriptures.

We all, surely, know the story--How Joseph's brethren envy him and
sell him for a slave into Egypt--how there for a while he prospers--
how his master's wife tempts him--how he is thrown into prison on
her slander--how there again he prospers--how he explains the dreams
of Pharaoh's servants--how he lies long forgotten in the prison--how
at last Pharaoh sends for him to interpret a dream for him, and how
he rises to power and great glory--how his brothers come down to
Egypt to buy corn, and how they find him lord of all the land--how
subtilly he tries them to see if they have repented of their old
sin--how his heart yearns over them in spite of all their wickedness
to him--how at last he reveals himself, and forgives them utterly,
and sends for his poor old father Jacob down into Egypt.  Whosoever
does not delight in that story, simply as a story, whenever he hears
it read, cannot have a wholesome human heart in him.

But why was this story of Joseph put into Holy Scripture, and at
such length, too?  It seems, at first sight, to be simply a family
history--the story of brothers and their father; it seems, at first
sight, to teach us nothing concerning our redemption and salvation;
it seems, at first sight, not to reveal anything fresh to us
concerning God; it seems, at first sight, not to be needed for the
general plan of the Bible history.  It tells us, of course, how the
Israelites first came into Egypt; and that was necessary for us to
know.  But the Bible might have told us that in ten verses.  Why has
it spent upon the story of Joseph and his brethren, not ten verses,
but ten chapters?

Now we have a right to ask such questions as these, if we do not ask
them out of any carping, fault-finding spirit, trying to pick holes
in the Bible, from which God defend us and all Christian men.  If we
ask such questions in faith and reverence--that is, believing and
taking for granted that the Bible is right, and respecting it, as
the Book of books, in which our own forefathers and all Christian
nations upon earth for many ages have found all things necessary for
their salvation--if, I say, we question over the Bible in that
child-like, simple, respectful spirit, which is the true spirit of
wisdom and understanding, by which our eyes will be truly opened to
see the wondrous things of God's law:  then we may not only seek as
our Lord bade us, but we shall find, as our Lord prophesied that we
should.  We shall find some good reason for this story of Joseph
being so long, and find that the story of Joseph, like all the rest
of the Bible, reveals a new lesson to us concerning God and the
character of God.

I said that the story of Joseph looks, at first sight, to be merely
a family history.  But suppose that that were the very reason why it
is in the Bible, because it is a family history.  Suppose that
families were very sacred things in the eyes of God.  That the ties
of husband and wife, parent and child, brother and sister, were
appointed, not by man, but by God.  Then would not Joseph's story be
worthy of being in the Bible?  Would it not, as I said it would,
reveal something fresh to us concerning God and the character of
God?

Consider now, my friends:  Is it not one great difference--one of
the very greatest--between men and beasts, that men live in
families, and beasts do not?  That men have the sacred family
feeling, and beasts have not?  They have the beginnings of it, no
doubt.  The mother, among beasts, feels love to her children, but
only for a while.  God has implanted in her something of that
deepest, holiest, purest of all feelings--a mother's love.  But as
soon as her young ones are able to take care of themselves, they are
nothing to her--among the lower animals, less than nothing.  The
fish or the crocodile will take care of her eggs jealously, and as
soon as they are hatched, turn round and devour her own young.

The feeling of a FATHER to his child, again, you find is fainter
still among beasts.  The father, as you all know, not only cares
little for his offspring, even if he sometimes helps to feed them at
first, but is often jealous of them, hates them, will try to kill
them when they grow up.

Husband and wife, again:  there is no sacredness between them among
dumb animals.  A lasting and an unselfish attachment, not merely in
youth, but through old age and beyond the grave--what is there like
this among the animals, except in the case of certain birds, like
the dove and the eagle, who keep the same mate year after year, and
have been always looked on with a sort of affection and respect by
men for that very reason?

But where, among beasts, do you ever find any trace of those two
sacred human feelings--the love of brother to brother, or of child
to father?  Where do you find the notion that the tie between
husband and wife is a sacred thing, to be broken at no temptation,
but in man?

These are THE feelings which man has alone of all living animals.

These then, remember, are the very family feelings which come out in
the story of Joseph.  He honours holy wedlock when he tells his
master's wife, 'How can I do this great wickedness, and sin against
God?'  He honours his father, when he is not ashamed of him, wild
shepherd out of the desert though he might be, and an abomination to
the Egyptians, while he himself is now in power and wealth and
glory, as a prince in a civilized country.  He honours the tie of
brother to brother, by forgiving and weeping over the very brothers
who have sold him into slavery.

But what has all this to do with God?

Now man, as we know, is an animal with an immortal spirit in him.
He has, as St. Paul so carefully explains to us, a flesh and a
spirit--a flesh like the beasts which perish; a spirit which comes
from God.

Now the Bible teaches us that man did not get these family feelings
from his flesh, from the animal, brute part of him.  They are not
carnal, but spiritual.  He gets them from his spirit, and they are
inspired into him by the Spirit of God.  They come not from the
earth below, but from the heaven above; from the image of God, in
which man alone of all living things was made.

For if it were not so, we should surely see some family feeling in
the beasts which are most like men.  But we do not.  In the apes,
which are, in their shape and fleshly nature, so strangely and
shockingly like human beings, there is not as much family feeling as
there is in many birds, or even insects.  Nay, the wild negroes,
among whom they live, hold them in abhorrence, and believe that they
were once men like themselves, who were gradually changed into brute
beasts, by giving way to detestable sins; while these very negroes
themselves, heathens and savages as they are, HAVE the family
feeling--the feeling of husband for wife, father for child, brother
for brother; not, indeed, as strongly and purely as we, or at least
those of us who are really Christian and civilized, but still they
have it; and that makes between the lowest man and the highest brute
a difference which I hold is as wide as the space between heaven and
earth.

It is man alone, I say, who has the idea of family; and who has,
too, the strange, but most true belief that these family ties are
appointed by God--that they are a part of his religion--that in
breaking them, by being an unfaithful husband, a dishonest servant,
an unnatural son, a selfish brother, he sins, not only against man,
and man's order and laws, but against God.

Parent and child, brother and sister--those ties are not of the
earth earthy, but of the heaven of God, eternal.  They may begin in
time; of what happened before we came into this world we know
nought.  But having begun, they cannot end.  Of what will happen
after we leave this world, that at least we know in part.

Parent and child; brother and sister; husband and wife likewise;
these are no ties of man's invention.  They are ties of God's
binding; they are patterns and likenesses of his substance, and of
his being.  Of the eternal Father, who says for ever to the eternal
Son, 'This day have I begotten THEE.'  Of the Son who says for ever
to the Father, 'I come to do thy will, O God.'  Of the Son of God,
Jesus Christ, who is not ashamed to call us his brethren; but like a
greater Joseph, was sent before by God to save our lives with a
great deliverance when our forefathers were but savages and
heathens.  Husband and wife likewise--are not they two divine words-
-not human words at all?  Has not God consecrated the state of
matrimony to such an excellent mystery, that in it is signified and
represented the mystical union between Christ and his Church?  Are
not husbands to love their wives, and give themselves for them as
Christ loved the Church and gave himself for it?  That, indeed, was
not revealed in the Old Testament, but it is revealed in the New;
and marriage, like all other human ties, is holy and divine, and
comes from God down to men.

Yes.  These family ties are of God.  It was to show us how sacred,
how Godlike they are--how eternal and necessary for all mankind--
that Joseph's story was written in Holy Scripture.

They are of God, I say.  And he who despises them, despises not man
but God; who hath also given us his Holy Spirit to make us know how
sacred these bonds are.

He who looks lightly on the love of child to parent, or brother to
brother, or husband to wife, and bids each man please himself, each
man help himself, and shift for himself, would take away from men
the very thing which raises them above the beasts which perish, and
lower them again to the likeness of the flesh, that they may of the
flesh reap corruption.

They who, under whatever pretence of religion part asunder families;
or tell children, like the wicked Pharisees of old, that they may
say to their parents, Corban--'I have given to God the service and
help which, as your child, I should have given to you'--shall be
called, if not by men, at least by God himself, hypocrites, who draw
near to God with their mouths, and honour him with their lips, while
their heart is far from him.

I think now we may see that I was right when I said--Perhaps the
history of Joseph is in the Bible because it IS a family history.
For see, it is the history of a man who loved his family, who felt
that family life was holy and God-appointed; whom God rewarded with
honour and wealth, because he honoured family ties; because he
refused his master's wife; because he rewarded his brothers good for
evil; because he was not ashamed of his father, but succoured him in
his old age.

It is the history of a man who--more than four hundred years before
God gave the ten commandments on Sinai, saying,

Honour thy father and mother,

Thou shalt not commit adultery,

Thou shalt not kill in revenge,

Thou shalt not covet aught of thy neighbours--It is the history, I
say, of a man who had those laws of God written in his heart by the
Holy Spirit of God; and felt that to break them was to sin against
God.  It is the history of a man who, sorely tempted and unjustly
persecuted, kept himself pure and true; who, while all around him,
beginning with his own brothers, were trampling under foot the laws
of family, felt that the laws were still there round him, girding
him in with everlasting bands, and saying to him, Thou shalt and
Thou shalt not; that he was not sent into the world to do just what
was pleasant for the moment, to indulge his own passions or his own
revenge; but that if he was indeed a man, he must prove himself a
man, by obeying Almighty God.  It is the history of a man who kept
his heart pure and tender, and who thereby gained strange and deep
wisdom; that wisdom which comes only to the pure in heart; that
wisdom by which truly good men are enabled to see farther, and to be
of more use to their fellow-creatures than many a cunning and
crooked politician, whose eyes are blinded, because his heart is
defiled with sin.

And now, my friends, if we pray--as we are bound to pray--for that
great Prince who is just entering on the cares and the duties, as
well as the joys and blessings of family life--what better prayer
can we offer up for him, than that God would put into his heart that
spirit which he put into the heart of Joseph of old--the spirit to
see how divine and God-appointed is family life?  God grant that
that spirit may dwell in him, and possess him more and more day by
day.  That it may keep him true to his wife, true to his mother,
true to his family, true, like Joseph, to all with whom he has to
deal.  That it may deliver him, as it delivered Joseph, from the
snares of wicked women, from selfish politicians, if they ever try
to sow distrust and opposition between him and his kindred, and from
all those temptations which can only be kept down by the Spirit of
God working in men's hearts, as he worked in the heart of Joseph.

For if that spirit be in the Prince--and I doubt not that that
spirit is in him already--then will his fate be that of Joseph; then
will he indeed be a blessing to us, and to our children after us;
then will he have riches more real, and power more vast, than any
which our English laws can give; then will he gain, like Joseph,
that moral wisdom, better than all worldly craft, which cometh from
above--first pure, then gentle, easy to be entreated, without
partiality, and without hypocrisy; then will he be able, like
Joseph, to deliver his people in times of perplexity and distress;
then will he by his example, as his noble mother has done before
him, keep healthy, pure, and strong, our English family life--and as
long as THAT endures, Old England will endure likewise.



SERMON VIII.  THE BIBLE THE GREAT CIVILIZER



(Fourth Sunday in Lent.)

PHILIPPIANS iv. 8.  Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true,
whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever
things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are
of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise,
think on these things.

It may not be easy to see what this text has to do with the story of
Joseph, which we have just been reading, or with the meaning of the
Bible of which I have been speaking to you of late.

Nevertheless, I think it has to do with them; as you will see if you
will look at the text with me.

Now the text does not say 'Do these things.'  It only says 'THINK of
these things.'

Of course St. Paul wished us to do them also; but he says first
THINK of them; not once in a way, but often and continually.  Fill
your mind with good and pure and noble thoughts; and then you will
do good and pure and noble things.

For out of the abundance of a man's heart, not only does his mouth
speak, but his whole body and soul behave.  The man whose mind is
filled with low and bad thoughts will be sure, when he is tempted,
to do low and bad things.  The man whose mind is filled with lofty
and good thoughts will do lofty and good things.

For thoughts are the food of a man's mind; and as the mind feeds, so
will it grow.  If it feeds on coarse and foul food, coarse and foul
it will grow.  If it feeds on pure and refined food, pure and
refined it will grow.

There are those who do not believe this.  Provided they are
tolerably attentive to the duties of religion, it does not matter
much, they fancy, what they think of out of church.  Their souls
will be saved at last, they suppose, and that is all that they need
care for.  Saved?  They do not see that by giving way to foul, mean,
foolish thoughts all the week they are losing their souls,
destroying their souls, defiling their souls, lowering their souls,
and making them so coarse and mean and poor that they are not worth
saving, and are no loss to heaven or earth, whatever loss they may
be to the man himself.  One man thinks of nothing but money--how he
shall save a penny here and a penny there.  I do not mean men of
business; for them there are great excuses; for it is by continual
saving here and there that their profits are made.  I speak rather
of people who have no excuse, people of fixed incomes--people often
wealthy and comfortable, who yet will lower their minds by
continually thinking over their money.  But this I say, and this I
am sure that you will find, that when a man in business or out of
business accustoms himself, as very many do, to think of nothing but
money, money, money from Monday morning to Saturday night, he thinks
of money a great part of Sunday likewise.  And so, after a while,
the man lowers his soul, and makes it mean and covetous.  He forgets
all that is lovely and of good report.  He forgets virtue--that is
manliness; and praise--that is the just respect and admiration of
his fellow-men; and so he forgets at last things true, honest, and
just likewise.  He lowers his soul; and therefore when he is
tempted, he does things mean and false and unjust, for the sake of
money, which he has made his idol.

Take another case, too common among men and women of all ranks, high
and low.

How many there are who love gossip and scandal; who always talk
about people, and never about things--certainly not about things
pure and lovely and of good report, but rather about things foul and
ugly and of bad report; who do not talk, because they do not think
of virtue, but of vice; or of praise either, because they are always
finding fault with their neighbours.  The man who loves a foul
story, or a coarse jest--the woman who gossips over every tittle
tattle of scandal which she can pick up against her neighbour--what
do these people do but defile their own souls afresh, after they
have been washed clean in the blood of Christ?  Foul their souls
are, and therefore their thoughts are foul likewise, and the
foulness of them is evident to all men by their tongues.  Out of
their hearts proceed evil thoughts about their neighbours, out of
the abundance of their hearts their mouths speak them.  Now let such
people, if there be any such here, seriously consider the harm which
they are doing to their own characters.  They may give way to the
habits of scandal, or of coarse talk, without any serious bad
intention; but they will surely lower their own souls thereby.  They
will grow to the colour of what they feed on and become foul and
cruel, from talking cruelly and foully, till they lose all purity
and all charity, all faith and trust in their fellow-men, all power
of seeing good in any one, or doing anything but think evil; and so
lose the likeness of God and of Christ, for the likeness of some
foul carrion bird, which cares nothing for the perfume of all the
roses in the world, but if there be a carcase within miles of it,
will scent it out eagerly and fly to it ravenously.

The truth is, my friends, that these souls of ours instead of being
pure and strong, are the very opposite; and the article speaks plain
truth when it says, that we are every one of us of our own nature
inclined to evil.  That may seem a hard saying; but if we look at
our own thoughts we shall find it true.  Are we NOT inclined to
take, at first, the worst view of everybody and of everything?  Are
we NOT inclined to suspect harm of this person and of that?  Are we
NOT inclined too often to be mean and cowardly? to be hard and
covetous? to be coarse and vulgar? to be silly and frivolous?  Do we
not need to cool down, to think a second time, and a third time
likewise; to remember our duty, to remember Christ's example, before
we can take a just and kind and charitable view?  Do we not want all
the help which we can get from every quarter, to keep ourselves
high-minded and refined; to keep ourselves from bad thoughts, mean
thoughts, silly thoughts, violent thoughts, cruel and hard thoughts?
If we have not found out that, we must have looked a very little way
into ourselves, and know little more about ourselves than a dumb
animal does of itself.

How then shall we keep off coarseness of soul?  How shall we keep
our souls REFINED? that is, true and honest, pure, amiable, full of
virtue, that is, true manliness; and deserve praise, that is, the
respect and admiration of our fellow-men?  By thinking of those very
things, says St. Paul.  And in order to be able to think of them, by
reading of them.

There are very few who can easily think of these things of
themselves.  Their daily business, the words and notions of the
people with whom they have to do, will run in their minds, and draw
them off from higher and better thoughts; that cannot be helped.
The only thing that most men can do, is to take care that they are
not drawn off entirely from high and good thoughts, by reading, were
it but for five minutes every day, something really worth thinking
of, something which will lift them above themselves.

Above all, it is wise, at night, after the care and bustle of the
day is over, to read, but for a few minutes, some book which will
compose and soothe the mind; which will bring us face to face with
the true facts of life, death, and eternity; which will make us
remember that man doth not live by bread alone; which will give us,
before we sleep, a few thoughts worthy of a Christian man, with an
immortal soul in him.

And, thank God, no one need go far to look for such books.  I do not
mean merely religious books, excellent as they are in these days:  I
mean any books which help to make us better and wiser and soberer,
and more charitable persons; any books which will teach us to
despise what is vulgar and mean, foul and cruel, and to love what is
noble and high-minded, pure and just.  We need not go far for them.
In our own noble English language we may read by hundreds, books
which will tell us of all virtue and of all praise.  The stories of
good and brave men and women; of gallant and heroic actions; of
deeds which we ourselves should be proud of doing; of persons whom
we feel, to be better, wiser, nobler than we are ourselves.

In our own language we may read the history of our own nation, and
whatsoever is just, honest and true.  We may read of God's gracious
providences toward this land.  How he has punished our sins and
rewarded our right and brave endeavours.  How he put into our
forefathers the spirit of courage and freedom, the spirit of truth
and justice, the spirit of loyalty and order; and how, following the
leading of that spirit, in spite of many mistakes and failings, we
have risen to be the freest, the happiest, the most powerful people
on earth, a blessing and not a curse to the nations around.

In our own English tongue, too, we may read such poetry as there is
in no other language in the world; poetry which will make us indeed
see the beauty of whatsoever things are lovely and of good report.
Some people have still a dislike of what they call foolish poetry
books.  If books are foolish, let us have nothing to do with them.
But poetry ought not to be foolish; for God sent it into the world
to teach men not foolishness, but the highest wisdom.  He gave man
alone, of all living creatures, the power of writing poetry, that by
poetry he might understand, not only how necessary it was to do
right, but how beautiful and noble it was to do right.  He sent it
into the world to soften men's rough hearts, and quiet their angry
passions, and make them love all which is tender and gentle, loving
and merciful, and yet to rouse them up to love all which is gallant
and honourable, loyal and patriotic, devout and heavenly.  Therefore
whole books of the Bible--Job, for example, Isaiah, and the Psalms--
are neither more nor less than actual poetry, written in actual
verse, that their words might the better sink down into the ears and
hearts of the old Jews, and of us Christians after them.  And
therefore also, we keep up still the good old custom of teaching
children in school as much as possible by poetry, that they may
learn not only to know, but to love and remember whatsoever things
are lovely and of good report.

Lastly, for those who cannot read, or have really no time to read,
there is one means left of putting themselves in mind of what every
one must remember, lest he sink back into an animal and a savage.  I
mean by pictures; which, as St. Augustine said 1400 years ago, are
the books of the unlearned.  I do not mean grand and expensive
pictures; I mean the very simplest prints, provided they represent
something holy, or noble, or tender, or lovely.  A few such prints
upon a cottage-wall may teach the people who live therein much,
without their being aware of it.  They see the prints, even when
they are not thinking of them; and so they have before their eyes a
continual remembrancer of something better and more beautiful than
what they are apt to find in their own daily life and thoughts.

True, to whom little is given, of them is little required.  But it
must be said, that more--far more--is given to labouring men and
women now than was given to their forefathers.  A hundred, or even
fifty years ago, when there was very little schooling; when the
books which were put even into the hands of noblemen's children were
far below what you will find now in any village school; when the
only pictures which a poor woman could buy to lay on her cottage-
wall were equally silly and ugly:  then there were great excuses for
the poor, if they forgot whatsoever things were lovely and of good
report; if they were often coarse and brutal in their manners, and
cruel and profligate in their amusements.

But even in the rough old times there always were a few at least,
men and women, who were above the rest; who, though poor people like
the rest, were still true gentlemen and ladies of God's making.
People who kept themselves more or less unspotted from the world;
who thought of what was honest and pure and lovely and of good
report; and who lived a life of simple, manful, Christian virtue,
and received the praise and respect of their neighbours, even
although their neighbours did not copy them.  There were always such
people, and there always will be--thank God for it, for they are the
salt of the earth.

But why have there always been such people? and why do I say
confidently, that there always will be?

Because they have had the Bible; and because, once having got the
Bible in a free country, no man can take it from them.

The Bible it is which has made gentlemen and ladies of many a poor
man and woman.

The Bible it is which has filled their minds with pure and noble,
ay, with heavenly and divine thoughts.

The Bible has been their whole library.  The Bible has been their
only counsellor.  The Bible has taught them all they know.  But it
has taught them enough.

It has taught them what God is, and what Christ is.  It has taught
them what man is, and what a Christian man should be.  It has taught
them what a family means, and what a nation means.  It has taught
them the meaning of law and duty, of loyalty and patriotism.  It has
filled their minds with things honest and just and lovely and of
good report; with the histories of men and women like themselves,
who sinned and sorrowed and struggled like them in this hard battle
of life, but who conquered at last, by trusting and obeying God.

This one story of Joseph, which we have been reading again this
Sunday, I do not doubt that it has taught thousands who had no other
story-book to read--who could not even read themselves, but had to
listen to others' reading; that it has taught them to be good sons,
to be good brothers; that it has taught them to keep pure in
temptation, and patient and honest under oppression and wrong; that
it has stirred in them a noble ambition to raise themselves in life;
and taught them, at the same time, that the only safe and sure way
of rising is to fear God and keep his commandments; and so has
really done more to civilize and refine them--to make them truly
civilized men and gentlemen, and not vulgar savages--than if they
had known a smattering of a dozen sciences.  I say that the Bible is
the book which civilizes and refines, and ennobles rich and poor,
high and low, and has been doing so for fifteen hundred years; and
that any man who tries to shake our faith in the Bible, is doing
what he can--though, thank God, he will not succeed--to make such
rough and coarse heathens of us again as our forefathers were five
hundred years ago.

And I tell you, labouring people, that if you want something which
will make up to you for the want of all the advantages which the
rich have--go to your Bibles and you will find it there.

There you will find, in the history of men like ourselves--and,
above all, in the history of a man unlike ourselves, the perfect
Man--perfect Man and perfect God together--whatsoever is true,
whatsoever is honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report; every
virtue, and every just cause of praise which mortal man can desire.
Read of them in your Bible, think of them in your hearts, feed on
them with your souls, that your souls may grow like what they feed
on; and above all, read and study the story and character of Jesus
Christ himself, our Lord, that beholding, as in a glass, the glory
of the Lord, you may be changed into his likeness, from grace to
grace, and virtue to virtue, and glory to glory.

And that change and that growth are as easy for the poor as for the
rich, and as necessary for the rich as for the poor.



SERMON IX.  MOSES



(Fifth Sunday in Lent.)

EXODUS iii. 14.  And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM.

And now, my friends, we are come, on this Sunday, to the most
beautiful, and the most important story of the whole Bible--
excepting of course, the story of our Lord Jesus Christ--the story
of how a family grew to be a great nation.  You remember that I told
you that the history of the Jews, had been only, as yet, the history
of a family.

Now that family is grown to be a great tribe, a great herd of
people, but not yet a nation; one people, with its own God, its own
worship, its own laws; but such a mere tribe, or band of tribes as
the gipsies are among us now; a herd, but not a nation.

Then the Bible tells us how these tribes, being weak I suppose
because they had no laws, nor patriotism, nor fellow-feeling of
their own, became slaves, and suffered for hundreds of years under
crafty kings and cruel taskmasters.

Then it tells us how God delivered them out of their slavery, and
made them free men.  And how God did that (for God in general works
by means), by the means of a man, a prophet and a hero, one great,
wise, and good man of their race--Moses.

It tells us, too, how God trained Moses, by a very strange
education, to be the fit man to deliver his people.

Let us go through the history of Moses; and we shall see how God
trained him to do the work for which God wanted him.

Let us read from the account of the Bible itself.  I should be sorry
to spoil its noble simplicity by any words of my own:  'And the
children of Israel were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and
multiplied, and waxed exceeding mighty; and the land was filled with
them.  Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not
Joseph.  And he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the
children of Israel are more and mightier than we:  Come on, let us
deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass,
that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our
enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land.
Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with
their burdens.  And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithon
and Raamses. . . .  And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying,
Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every
daughter ye shall save alive.  And there went a man of the house of
Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi.  And the woman conceived
and bare a son:  and when she saw him that he was a goodly child,
she hid him three months.  And when she could no longer hide him,
she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and
with pitch, and put the child therein:  and she laid it in the flags
by the river's brink.  And his sister stood afar off, to wit what
would be done to him.  And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to wash
herself at the river; and her maidens walked along by the river's
side; and when she saw the ark among the flags, she sent her maid to
fetch it.  And when she had opened it, she saw the child; and behold
the babe wept.  And she had compassion on him, and said, This is one
of the Hebrews' children.  Then said his sister to Pharaoh's
daughter, Shall I go and call to thee a nurse of the Hebrew women,
that she may nurse the child for thee?  And Pharaoh's daughter said
to her, Go.  And the maid went and called the child's mother.  And
Pharaoh's daughter said unto her, Take this child away, and nurse it
for me, and I will give thee thy wages.  And the woman took the
child, and nursed it.  And the child grew, and she brought him unto
Pharaoh's daughter, and he became her son.  And she called his name
Moses:  and she said, Because I drew him out of the water.'

Moses, the child of the water.  St. Paul in the Epistle to the
Hebrews says that Moses was called the son of Pharaoh's daughter;
that is, adopted by her.  We read elsewhere that he was learned in
all the wisdom of the Egyptians, of which there can be no doubt from
his own writings, especially that part called Moses' law.

So that Moses had from his youth vast advantages.  Brought up in the
court of the greatest king of the world, in one of the greatest
cities of the world, among the most learned priesthood in the world,
he had learned, probably, all statesmanship, all religion, which man
could teach him in those old times.

But that would have been little for him.  He might have become
merely an officer in Pharaoh's household, and we might never have
heard his name, and he might never have done any good to his own
people and to all mankind after them, as he has done, if there had
not been something better and nobler in him than all the learning
and statesmanship of the Egyptians.

For there was in Moses the spirit of God; the spirit which makes a
man believe in God, and trust God.  'And therefore,' says St. Paul,
'he refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; esteeming
the reproach of CHRIST better than all the treasures in Egypt.'

And how did he do that?  In this wise.

The spirit of God and of Christ is also the spirit of justice, the
spirit of freedom; the spirit which hates oppression and wrong;
which is moved with a noble and Divine indignation at seeing any
human being abused and trampled on.

And that spirit broke forth in Moses.  'And it came to pass in those
days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and
looked on their burdens:  and he spied an Egyptian smiting an
Hebrew, one of his brethren.  And he looked this way and that way,
and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid
him in the sand.'

If he cannot get justice for his people, he will do some sort of
rough justice for them himself, when he has an opportunity.

But he will see fair play among his people themselves.  They are, as
slaves are likely to be, fallen and base; unjust and quarrelsome
among themselves.

'And when he went out the second day, behold, two men of the Hebrews
strove together:  and he said to him that did the wrong, Wherefore
smitest thou thy fellow?  And he said, Who made thee a prince and a
judge over us? intendest thou to kill me as thou killedst the
Egyptian?  And Moses feared, and said, Surely this thing is known.
Now when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to slay Moses.  But
Moses fled from the face of Pharaoh, and dwelt in the land of
Midian'--the wild desert between Egypt and the Holy Land.

So he bore the reproach of Christ; the reproach which is apt to fall
on men in bad times, when they try, like our Lord Jesus Christ, to
deliver the captive, and let the oppressed go free, and execute
righteous judgment in the earth.  He had lost all, by trying to do
right.  He had been powerful and honoured in Pharaoh's court.  Now
he was an outcast and wanderer in the desert.  He had made his first
trial, and failed.  As St. Stephen said of him after, he supposed
that his brethren would have understood how God would deliver them
by his hand; but they understood not.  Slavish, base, and stupid,
they were not fit yet for Moses and his deliverance.

And so forty years went on, and Moses was an old man of eighty years
of age.  Yet God had not had mercy on his poor countrymen in Egypt.

It must have been a strange life for him, the adopted son of
Pharaoh's daughter; brought up in the court of the most powerful and
highly civilized country of the old world; learned in all the
learning of the Egyptians; and now married into a tribe of wild
Arabs, keeping flocks in the lonely desert, year after year:  but,
no doubt, thinking, thinking, year after year, as he fed his flocks
alone.  Thinking over all the learning which he had gained in Egypt,
and wondering whether it would ever be of any use to him.  Thinking
over the misery of his people in Egypt, and wondering whether he
should ever be able to help them.  Thinking, too, and more than all,
of God--of God's promise to Abraham and his children.  Would that
ever come true?  Would GOD help these wretched Jews, even if HE
could not?  Was God faithful and true, just and merciful?

That Moses thought of God, that he never lost faith in God for that
forty years, there can be no doubt.

If he had not thought of God, God would not have revealed himself to
him.  If he had lost faith in God, he would not have known that it
was God who spoke to him.  If he had lost faith in God, he would not
have obeyed God at the risk of his life, and have gone on an errand
as desperate, dangerous, hopeless--and, humanly speaking, as wild as
ever man went upon.

But Moses never lost faith or patience.  He believed, and he did not
make haste.  He waited for God; and he did not wait in vain.  No man
will wait in vain.  When the time was ready; when the Jews were
ready; when Pharaoh was ready; when Moses himself, trained by forty
years' patient thought, was ready; then God came in his own good
time.

And Moses led the flock to the back of the desert, and came to the
mountain of God, even to Horeb.  And there he saw a bush--probably
one of the low copses of acacia--burning with fire; and behold the
bush was not consumed.  Then out of the bush God spoke to Moses with
an audible voice as of a man; so the Bible says plainly, and I see
no reason to doubt that it is literally true.

'Moreover he said, I am the God of thy father, the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.  And Moses hid his face; for
he was afraid to look upon God.  And the Lord said, I have surely
seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard
their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows;
and I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians,
and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a large,
unto a land flowing with milk and honey; unto the place of the
Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites,
and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.'

Then followed a strange conversation.  Moses was terrified at the
thought of what he had to do, and reasonably:  moreover, the
Israelites in Egypt had forgotten God.  'And Moses said unto God,
Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto
them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall
say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?  And God
said unto Moses, I Am that I Am:  and he said, Thus shalt thou say
unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you.'

I Am; that was the new name by which God revealed himself to Moses.
That message of God to Moses was the greatest Gospel, and good news
which was spoken to men, before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Ay, we are feeling now, in our daily life, in our laws and our
liberty, our religion and our morals, our peace and prosperity, in
the happiness of our homes, and I trust that of our consciences, the
blessed effects of that message, which God revealed to Moses in the
wilderness thousands of years ago.

And Moses took his wife, and his sons, and set them upon an ass, and
returned into the land of Egypt, to say to Pharaoh, 'Thus saith the
Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn, Let my son go that he may
serve me, and if thou let not my firstborn go, then I will slay thy
firstborn.'

A strange man, on a strange errand.  A poor man, eighty years old,
carrying all that he had in the world upon an ass's back, going down
to the great Pharaoh, the greatest king of the old world, the great
conqueror, the Child of the Sun (as his name means), one of the
greatest Pharaohs who ever sat on the throne of Egypt; in the midst
of all his princes and priests, and armies with which he had
conquered the nations far and wide; and his great cities, temples,
and palaces, on which men may see at this day (so we are told) the
face of that very Pharaoh painted again and again, as fresh, in that
rainless air, as on the day when the paint was laid on; with the
features of a man terrible, proud, and cruel, puffed up by power
till he thought himself, and till his people thought him a god on
earth.

And to that man was Moses going, to bid him set the children of
Israel free; while he himself was one of that very slave-race of the
Israelites, which was an abomination to the Egyptians, who held them
all as lepers and unclean, and would not eat with them; and an
outcast too, who had fled out of Egypt for his life, and who might
be killed on the spot, as Pharaoh's only answer to his bold request.
Certainly, if Moses had not had faith in God, his errand would have
seemed that of a madman.  But Moses HAD faith in God; and of faith
it is said, that it can remove mountains, for all things are
possible to them who believe.

So by faith Moses went back into Egypt; how he fared there we shall
hear next Sunday.

And what sort of man was this great and wonderful Moses, whose name
will last as long as man is man?  We know very little.  We know from
the Bible and from the old traditions of the Jews that he was a very
handsome man; a man of a noble presence, as one can well believe; a
man of great bodily vigour; so that when he died at the age of one
hundred and twenty, his eye was not dim, nor his natural force
abated.  We know, from his own words, that he was slow of speech;
that he had more thought in him than he could find words for--very
different from a good many loud talkers, who have more words than
thoughts, and who get a great character as politicians and
demagogues, simply because they have the art of stringing fine words
together, which Moses, the true demagogue, the leader of the people,
who led them indeed out of Egypt, had not.  Beyond that we know
little.  Of his character one thing only is said:  but that is most
important.  'Now the man Moses was very meek.'

Meek:  we know that that cannot mean that he was meek in the sense
that he was a poor, cowardly, abject sort of man, who dared not
speak his mind, dared not face the truth, and say the truth.  We
have seen that that was just what he was not; brave, determined,
out-spoken, he seems to have been from his youth.  Indeed, if his
had been that base sort of meekness, he never would have dared to
come before the great king Pharaoh.  If he had been that sort of man
he never would have dared to lead the Jews through the Red Sea by
night, or out of Egypt at all.  If he had been that sort of man,
indeed, the Jews would never have listened to him.  No; he had--the
Bible tells us that he had--to say and do stern things again and
again; to act like the general of an army, or the commander of a
ship of war, who must be obeyed, even though men's lives be the
forfeit of disobedience.

But the man Moses was very meek.  He had learned to keep his temper.
Indeed, the story seems to say that he never lost his temper really
but once; and for that God punished him.  Never man was so tried,
save One, even our Lord Jesus Christ, as was Moses.  And yet by
patience he conquered.  Eighty years had he spent in learning to
keep his temper; and when he had learned to keep his temper, then,
and not till then, was he worthy to bring his people out of Egypt.
That was a long schooling, but it was a schooling worth having.

And if we, my friends, spend our whole lives, be they eighty years
long, in learning to keep our tempers, then will our lives have been
well spent.  For meekness and calmness of temper need not interfere
with a man's courage or justice, or honest indignation against
wrong, or power of helping his fellow-men.  Moses' meekness did not
make him a coward or a sluggard.  It helped him to do his work
rightly instead of wrongly; it helped him to conquer the pride of
Pharaoh, and the faithlessness, cowardice, and rebellion of his
brethren, those miserable slavish Jews.  And so meekness, an even
temper, and a gracious tongue, will help us to keep our place among
our fellow-men with true dignity and independence, and to govern our
households, and train our children in such a way that while they
obey us they will love and respect us at the same time.



SERMON X.  THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT



(Palm Sunday.)

EXODUS ix. 13, 14.  Thus saith the Lord God of the Hebrews, Let my
people go, that they may serve me.  For I will at this time send all
my plagues upon thine heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy
people; that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the
earth.

You will understand, I think, the meaning of the ten plagues of
Egypt better, if I explain to you in a few words what kind of a
country Egypt is, what kind of people the Egyptians were.  Some of
you, doubtless, know as well as I, but some here may not:  it is for
them I speak.

Egypt is one of the strangest countries in the world; and yet one
which can be most simply described.  One long straight strip of rich
flat land, many hundred miles long, but only a very few miles broad.
On either side of it, barren rocks and deserts of sand, and running
through it from end to end, the great river Nile--'The River' of
which the Bible speaks.  This river the Egyptians looked on as
divine:  they worshipped it as a god; for on it depended the whole
wealth of Egypt.  Every year it overflows the whole country, leaving
behind it a rich coat of mud, which makes Egypt the most
inexhaustibly fertile land in the world; and made the Egyptians,
from very ancient times, the best farmers of the world, the fathers
of agriculture.  Meanwhile, when not in flood, the river water is of
the purest in the world; the most delightful to drink; and was
supposed in old times to be a cure for all manner of diseases.

To worship this sacred river, the pride of their land, to drink it,
to bathe in it, to catch the fish which abound in it, and which
formed then, and forms still, the staple food of the Egyptians, was
their delight.  And now I have told you enough to show you why the
plagues which God sent on Egypt began first by striking the river.

The river, we read, was turned into blood.  What that means--whether
it was actual animal blood--what means God employed to work the
miracle--are just the questions about which we need not trouble our
minds.  We never shall know:  and we need not know.  The plain fact
is, that the sacred river, pure and life-giving, became a detestable
mass of rottenness--and with it all their streams and pools, and
drinking water in vessels of wood and stone--for all, remember, came
from the Nile, carried by canals and dykes over the whole land.
'And the fish that were in the river died, and the river stunk, and
there was blood through all the land of Egypt.'

The slightest thought will show us what horror, confusion, and
actual want and misery, the loss of the river water, even for a few
days or even hours, would cause.

But there is more still in this miracle.  These plagues are a battle
between Jehovah, the one true and only God Almighty, and the false
gods of Egypt, to prove which of them is master.

Pharaoh answers:  'Who is Jehovah (the Lord) that I should let
Israel go?'  I know not the Jehovah.  I have my own god, whom I
worship.  He is my father, and I his child, and he will protect me.
If I obey any one it will be him.

Be it so, says Moses in the name of God.  Thou shalt know that the
idols of Egypt are nothing, that they cannot deliver thee nor thy
people.

Thus saith Jehovah, Thou shalt know which is master, I or they.
'Thou shalt know that I am the Lord.'

So the river was turned into blood.  The sacred river was no god, as
they thought.  Jehovah was the Lord and Master of the river on which
the very life of Egypt depended.  He could turn it into blood.  All
Egypt was at his mercy.

But Pharaoh would not believe that.  'The magicians did likewise
with their enchantments'--made, we may suppose, water seem to turn
to blood by some juggling trick at which the priests in Egypt were
but too well practised; and Pharaoh seemed to have made up his mind
that Moses' miracle was only a juggling trick too.  For men will
make up their minds to anything, however absurd, when they choose to
do so:  when their pride, and rage, and obstinacy, and covetousness,
draw them one way, no reason will draw them the other way.  They
will find reasons, and make reasons to prove, if need be, that there
is no sun in the sky.

Then followed a series of plagues, of which we have all often heard.

Learned men have disputed how far these plagues were miracles.  Some
of them are said not to be uncommon in Egypt, others to be almost
unknown.  But whether they--whether the frogs, for instance, were
not produced by natural causes, just as other frogs are; and the
lice and the flies likewise; that I know not, my friends, neither
need I know.  If they were not, they were miraculous; and if they
were, they were miraculous still.  If they came as other vermin
come, they would have still been miraculous:  God would still have
sent them; and it would be a miracle that God should make them come
at that particular time in that particular country, to work a truly
miraculous effect upon the souls of Pharaoh and the Egyptians on the
one hand, and of Moses and the Israelites on the other.  But if they
came by some strange means as no vermin ever came before or since,
all I can say is--Why not?

And the Lord said unto Moses, 'Say unto Aaron, Stretch out thy rod
and smite the dust of the land, that it may become lice throughout
all the land of Egypt.'

Whether that was meant only as a sign to the Egyptians, or whether
the dust did literally turn into lice, we do not know, and what is
more, we need not know; if God chose that it should be so, so it
would be.  If you believe at all that God made the world, it is
folly to pretend to set any bounds to his power.  As a wise man has
said, 'If you believe in any real God at all, you must believe that
miracles can happen.'  He makes you and me and millions of living
things out of the dust of the ground continually by certain means.
Why can he not make lice, or anything else out of the dust of the
ground, without those means?  I can give no reason, nor any one else
either.

We know that God has given all things a law which they cannot break.
We know, too, that God will never break his own laws.  But what are
God's laws by which he makes things?  We do not know.

Miracles may be--indeed must be--only the effect of some higher and
deeper laws of God.  We cannot prove that he breaks his law, or
disturbs his order by them.  They may seem contrary to some of the
very very few laws of God's earth which we do know.  But they need
not be contrary to the very many laws which we do not know.  In
fact, we know nothing about the matter, and had best not talk of
things that we do not understand.  As for these things being too
wonderful to be true--that is an argument which only deserves a
smile.  There are so many wonders in the world round us already, all
day long, that the man of sense will feel that nothing is too
wonderful to be true.

The truth is, that, as a wise man says, CUSTOM is the great enemy of
Faith, and of Reason likewise; and one of the worst tricks which
custom plays us is, making us fancy that miraculous things cease to
be miraculous by becoming common.

What do I mean?

This:  which every child in this church can understand.

You think it very wonderful that God should cause frogs to come upon
the whole land of Egypt in one day.  But that God should cause frogs
to come up every spring in the ditches does not seem wonderful to
you at all.  It happens every year; therefore, forsooth, there is
nothing wonderful in it.

Ah, my dear friends, it is custom which blinds our eyes to the
wisdom of God, and the wonders of God, and the power of God, and the
glory of God, and hinders us from believing the message with which
he speaks to us from every sunbeam and every shower, every blade of
grass and every standing pool.  'Is anything too hard for the Lord?'

If any man here says that anything is too hard for the Lord, let him
go this day to the nearest standing pool, and look at the frog-spawn
therein, and consider it till he confesses his blindness and
foolishness.  That spawn seems to you a foul thing, the produce of
mean, ugly, contemptible creatures.  Be it so.  Yet it is to the
eyes of the wise man a yearly MIRACLE; a thing past understanding,
past explaining; one which will make him feel the truth of that
great 139th Psalm:  'Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid
thine hand upon me.  Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is
high, I cannot attain unto it.  Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
or whither shall I flee from thy presence?  If I ascend up into
heaven, thou art there:  if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art
there also.'

That every one of those little black spots should have in it LIFE--
What is life?  How did it get into that black spot? or, to speak
more carefully, is the life IN the black spot at all?  Is not the
life in the Spirit of God, who is working on that spot, as I
believe?  How has that black spot the power of GROWING, and of
growing on a certain and fixed plan, merely by the quickening power
of the sun's heat, and then of feeding itself, and of changing its
shape, as you all know, again and again, till--and if that is not
wonderful, what is?--it turns into a frog, exactly like its parent,
utterly unlike the black dot at which it began?  Is that no miracle?
Is it no miracle that not one of those black spots ever turns into
anything save a frog?  Why should not some of them turn into toads
or efts?  Why not even into fishes or serpents?  Why not?  The eggs
of all those animals, in their first and earliest stages are exactly
alike; the microscope shows no difference.  Ay, even the mere animal
and the human being, strange and awful as it may be, SEEM, under the
microscope, to have the same beginning.  And yet one becomes a mere
animal, and the other a member of Christ, a child of God, and an
inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.  What causes this but the power
of God, making of the same clay one vessel to honour and another to
dishonour?  And yet people will not believe in miracles!  Why does
each kind turn into its kind?  Answer that.  Because it is a law of
nature?  Not so!  There are no laws OF nature.  God is a law TO
nature.  It is his WILL that things so should be; and when it is his
will they will not be so, but otherwise.

Not LAWS of nature, but the SPIRIT of God, as the Psalms truly say,
gives life and breath to all things.  Of him and by him is all.  As
the greatest chemist of our time says, 'Causes are the acts of God--
creation is the will of God.'

And he that is wise and strong enough to create frogs in one way in
every ditch at this moment, is he not wise and strong enough to
create frogs by some other way, if he should choose, whether in
Egypt of old, or now, here, this very day?

Whatsoever means, or no means at all, God used to produce those
vermin, the miracle remains the same.  He sent them to do a work,
and they did it.  He sent them to teach Egyptian and Israelite alike
that he was the Maker, and Lord, and Ruler of the world, and all
that therein is; that he would have his way, and that he COULD have
his way.

Intensely painful and disgusting these plagues must have been to the
Egyptians, for this reason, that they were the most cleanly of all
people.  They had a dislike of dirt, which had become quite a
superstition to them.  Their priests (magicians as the Bible calls
them) never wore any garments but linen, for fear of their
harbouring vermin of any kind.  And this extreme cleanliness of
theirs the next plague struck at; they were covered with boils and
diseases of skin, and the magicians could not stand before Pharaoh
by reason of the boils.  They became unclean and unfit for their
office; they could perform no religious ceremonies, and had to flee
away in disgrace.

After plagues of thunder, hail, and rain, which seldom or never
happen in that rainless land of Egypt; after a plague of locusts,
which are very rare there, and have to come many hundred miles if
they come at all; of darkness, seemingly impossible in a land where
the sun always shines:  then came the last and most terrible plague
of all.  After solemn warnings of what was coming, the angel of the
Lord passed through the land of Egypt, and smote all the first-born
in Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh upon his throne to the
first-born of the captive in the dungeon; and there arose a great
cry in Egypt, for there was not a house in which there was not one
dead.  A terrible and heart-rending calamity in any case, enough to
break the heart of all Egypt; and it did break the heart of Egypt,
and the proud heart of Pharaoh himself, and they let the people go.

But this was a RELIGIOUS affliction too.  Most of these first-born
children--probably all the first-born of the priests and nobles, and
of Pharaoh himself--were consecrated to some god.  They bore the
name of the god to whom they belonged; that god was to prosper and
protect them, and behold, he could not.  The Lord Jehovah, the God
of the Hebrews, was stronger than all the gods of Egypt; none of
them could deliver their servants out of his hand.  He was the only
Lord of life and death; he had given them life, and he could take it
away, in spite of all and every one of the gods of the Egyptians.

So the Lord God showed himself to be the Master and Lord of all
things.  The Lord of the sacred river Nile; the Lord of the meanest
vermin which crept on the earth; the Lord of the weather--able to
bring thunder and hail into a land where thunder and hail was never
seen before; the Lord of the locust swarms--able to bring them over
the desert and over the sea to devour up every green thing in the
land, and then to send a wind off the Mediterranean Sea, and drive
the locusts away to the eastward; the Lord of light--who could
darken, even in that cloudless land, the very sun, whom Pharaoh
worshipped as his god and his ancestor; and lastly, the Lord of
human life and death--able to kill whom he chose, when he chose, and
as he chose.  The Lord of the earth and all that therein is; before
whom all men, even proud Pharaoh, must bow and confess, 'Is anything
too hard for the Lord?'

And now, I always tell you that each fresh portion of the Old
Testament reveals to men something fresh concerning the character of
God.  You may say, These plagues of Egypt reveal God's mighty power,
but what do they reveal of his character?  They reveal this:  that
there is in God that which, for want of a better word, we must call
anger; a quite awful sternness and severity; not only a power to
punish, but a determination to punish, if men will not take his
warnings--if men will not obey his will.

There is no use trying to hide from ourselves that awful truth--God
is not weakly indulgent.  Our God can be, if he will, a consuming
fire.  Upon the sinner he will surely rain fire and brimstone, storm
and tempest of some kind or other.  This shall be their portion too
surely.  Vengeance is his, and vengeance he will take.  But upon
whom?  On the proud and the tyrannical, on the cruel, the false, the
unjust.  So say the Psalms again and again, and so says the history
of these plagues of Egypt.  Therefore his anger is a loving anger, a
just auger, a merciful anger, a useful anger, an anger exercised for
the good of mankind.  See in this case why did God destroy the crops
of Egypt--even the first-born of Egypt?  Merely for the pleasure of
destroying?  God forbid.  It was to deliver the poor Israelites from
their cruel taskmasters; to force these Egyptians by terrible
lessons, since they were deaf to the voice of justice and humanity--
to force them, I say--to have mercy on their fellow-creatures, and
let the oppressed go free.  Therefore God was, even in Egypt, a God
of love, who desired the good of man, who would do justice for those
who were unjustly treated, even though it cost his love a pang; for
none can believe that God is pleased at having to punish, pleased at
having to destroy the works of his own hands, or the creatures which
he has made.  No; the Lord was a God of love even when he sent his
sore plagues on Egypt, and therefore we may believe what the Bible
tells us, that that same Lord showed, as on this day, a still
greater proof of his love, when, as on this day, he entered into
Jerusalem, meek and lowly, sitting on an ass, and going, as he well
knew, to certain death.  Before the week was over he would be
betrayed, mocked, scourged, crucified by the very people whom he
came to save; and yet he did it, he endured it.  Instead of pouring
out on them, as on the Egyptians of old, the cup of wrath and
misery, he put out his hand, took the cup of wrath and misery to
himself, and drank it to its very dregs.  Was not that, too, a
miracle?  Ay, a greater miracle than all the plagues of Egypt.  They
were physical miracles; this a moral miracle.  They were miracles of
nature; this of grace.  They were miracles of the Lord's power;
these of the Lord's love.  Think of that miracle of miracles which
was worked in this Passion Week--the miracle of the Lord Jehovah
stooping to die for sinful man, and say after that there is anything
too hard for the Lord.



SERMON XI.  THE GOD OF THE OLD TESTAMENT IS THE GOD OF THE NEW



(Palm Sunday.)

Exodus ix. 14.  I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine
heart, and upon thy servants, and upon thy people, that thou mayest
know that there is none like me in all the earth.

We are now beginning Passion Week, the week of the whole year which
ought to teach us most theology; that is, most concerning God, his
character and his spirit.

For in this Passion Week God did that which utterly and perfectly
showed forth his glory, as it never has been shown forth before or
since.  In this week Jesus Christ, the incarnate God, died on the
cross for man, and showed that his name, his character, his glory
was love--love without bound or end.

It was to teach us this that the special services, lessons,
collects, epistles, and gospels of this week were chosen.

The second lesson, the collects, the epistles, the gospel for to-
day, all set before us the patience of Christ, the humility of
Christ, the love of Christ, the self-sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb
without spot, enduring all things that he might save sinful man.

But if so, what does this first lesson--the chapter of Exodus from
which my text is taken--what does it teach us concerning God?  Does
it teach us that his name is love?

At first sight you would think that it did not.  At first sight you
would fancy that it spoke of God in quite a different tone from the
second lesson.

In the second lesson, the words of Jesus the Son of God are all
gentleness, patience, tenderness.  A quiet sadness hangs over them
all.  They are the words of one who is come (as he said himself),
not to destroy men's lives, but to save them; not to punish sins,
but to wash them away by his own most precious blood.

But in the first lesson how differently he seems to speak.  His
words there are the words of a stern and awful judge, who can, and
who will destroy whatsoever interferes with his will and his
purpose.

'I will at this time send all my plagues upon thine heart, and on
thy servants, and all thy people, that thou mayest know that there
is none like me in all the earth.'  The cattle and sheep shall be
destroyed with murrain; man and beast shall be tormented with boils
and blains; the crops shall be smitten with hail; the locusts shall
eat up every green thing in the land; and at last all the first-born
of Egypt shall die in one night, and the land be filled with
mourning, horror, and desolation, before the anger of this terrible
God, who will destroy and destroy till he makes himself obeyed.

Can this be he who rode into Jerusalem, as on this day, meek and
lowly, upon an ass's colt; who on the night that he was betrayed
washed his disciples' feet, even the feet of Judas who betrayed him?
Who prayed for his murderers as he hung upon the cross, 'Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do?'

Can these two be the same?

Is the Lord Jehovah of the Old Testament the Lord Jesus of the New?

They are the same, my friends.  He who laid waste the land of Egypt
is he who came to seek and to save that which was lost.

He who slew the children in Egypt is he who took little children up
in his arms and blessed them.

He who spoke the awful words of the text is he who was brought as a
lamb to the slaughter; and as a sheep before the shearers is dumb,
so he opened not his mouth.

This is very wonderful.  But why should it NOT be wonderful?  What
can God be but wonderful?  His character, just because it is
perfect, must contain in itself all other characters, all forms of
spiritual life which are without sin.  And yet again it is not so
very wonderful.  Have we not seen--I have often--in the same mortal
man these two different characters at once?  Have we not seen
soldiers and sailors, brave men, stern men, men who have fought in
many a bloody battle, to whom it is a light thing to kill their
fellow-men, or to be killed themselves in the cause of duty; and yet
most full of tenderness, as gentle as lambs to little children and
to weak women; nursing the sick lovingly and carefully with the same
hand which would not shrink from firing the fatal cannon to blast a
whole company into eternity, or sink a ship with all its crew?  I
have seen such men, brave as the lion and gentle as the lamb, and I
saw in them the likeness of Christ--the Lion of Judah; and yet the
Lamb of God.

Christ is the Lamb of God; and in him there are the innocence of the
lamb, the gentleness of the lamb, the patience of the lamb:  but
there is more.  What words are these which St. John speaks in the
spirit?--

'And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together, and
every mountain and island were moved out of their places; and the
kings of the earth, and the great, and the rich, and the chief
captains, and the mighty men, and every bondman and every freeman
hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains; and
said to the mountains and to the rocks, Fall on us, and hide us from
the face of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of
the Lamb; for the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be
able to stand?'

Yes, look at that awful book of Revelation with which the Bible
ends, and see if the Bible does not end as it began, by revealing a
God who, however loving and merciful, long-suffering, and of great
goodness, still wages war eternally against all sin and
unrighteousness of man, and who will by no means clear the guilty; a
God of whom the apostle St. Paul, who knew most of his mercy and
forgiveness to sinners, could nevertheless say, just as Moses had
said ages before him, 'Our God is a consuming fire.'

Now I think it most necessary to recollect this in Passion Week; ay,
and to do more--to remember it all our lives long.

For it is too much the fashion now, and has often been so before, to
think only of one side of our Lord's character, of the side which
seems more pleasant and less awful.  People please themselves in
hymns which talk of the meek and lowly Jesus, and in pictures which
represent him with a sad, weary, delicate, almost feminine face.
Now I do not say that this is wrong.  He is the same yesterday, to-
day, and for ever; as tender, as compassionate now as when he was on
earth; and it is good that little children and innocent young people
should think of him as an altogether gentle, gracious, loveable
being; for with the meek he will be meek; but again, with the
froward, the violent, and self-willed, he will be froward.  He will
show the violent that he is the stronger of the two, and the self-
willed that he will have his will and not theirs done.

So it is good that the widow and the orphan, the weary and the
distressed, should think of Jesus as utterly tender and true,
compassionate and merciful, and rest their broken hearts upon him,
the everlasting rock.  But while it is written, that whosoever shall
fall on that rock he shall be broken, it is written too, that on
whomsoever that rock shall fall, it will grind him to powder.

It is good that those who wish to be gracious themselves, loving
themselves, should remember that Christ is gracious, Christ is
loving.  But it is good also, that those who do NOT wish to be
gracious and loving themselves, but to be proud and self-willed,
unjust and cruel, should remember that the gracious and loving
Christ is also the most terrible and awful of all beings; sharper
than a two-edged sword, piercing asunder the very joints and marrow,
discerning the most secret thoughts and intents of the heart; a
righteous judge, strong and patient, who is provoked every day:  but
if a man WILL not turn he will whet his sword.  He hath bent his bow
and made it ready, and laid his arrows in order against the
persecutors.  What Christ's countenance, my friends, was like when
on earth, we do NOT know; but what his countenance is like now, we
all may know; for what says St. John, and how did Christ appear to
him, who had been on earth his private and beloved friend?

'His head and his hair were white as snow, and his eyes were like a
flame of fire, and his voice like the sound of many waters; and out
of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword, and his countenance was
as the sun when he shineth in his strength.  And when I saw him, I
fell at his feet as dead.'

That is the likeness of Christ, my friends; and we must remember
that it is his likeness, and fall at his feet, and humble ourselves
before his unspeakable majesty, if we wish that he should do to us
at the last day as he did to St. John--lay his hand upon us, saying,
'Fear not, I am the first and the last, and behold, I am alive for
evermore, Amen.  I have the keys of death and hell.'

Yes, it is good that we should all remember this.  For if we do not,
we may fall, as thousands fall, into a very unwholesome and immoral
notion about religion.  We may get to fancy, as thousands do, rich
and poor, that because Christ the Lord is meek and gentle, patient
and long-suffering, that he is therefore easy, indulgent, careless
about our doing wrong; and that we can, in plain English, trifle
with Christ, and take liberties with his everlasting laws of right
and wrong; and so fancy, that provided we talk of the meek and lowly
Jesus, and of his blood washing away all our sins, that we are free
to behave very much as if Jesus had never come into the world to
teach men their duty, and free to commit almost any sin which does
not disgrace us among our neighbours, or render us punishable by the
law.

My friends, it is NOT SO.  And those who fancy that it is so, will
find out their mistake bitterly enough.  Infinite love and
forgiveness to those who repent and amend and do right; but infinite
rigour and punishment to those who will not amend and do right.
This is the everlasting law of God's universe; and every soul of man
will find it out at last, and find that the Lord Jesus Christ is not
a Being to be trifled with, and that the precious blood which he
shed on the cross is of no avail to those who are not minded to be
righteous even as he is righteous.

'But Christ is so loving, so tender-hearted that he surely will not
punish us for our sins.'  This is the confused notion that too many
people have about him.  And the answer to it is, that just BECAUSE
Christ is so loving, so tender-hearted, therefore he MUST punish us
for our sins, unless we utterly give up our sins, and do right
instead of wrong.

That false notion springs out of men's selfishness.  They think of
sin as something which only hurts themselves; when they do wrong
they think merely, 'What punishment will God inflict on ME for doing
wrong?'  They are wrapt up in themselves.  They forget that their
sins are not merely a matter between them and Christ, but between
them and their neighbours; that every wrong action they commit,
every wrong word they speak, every wrong habit in which they indulge
themselves, sooner or later, more or less hurts their neighbours--
ay, hurts all mankind.

And does Christ care only for THEM?  Does he not care for their
neighbours?  Has he not all mankind to provide for, and govern and
guide?  And can he allow bad men to go on making this world worse,
without punishing them, any more than a gardener can allow weeds to
hurt his flowers, and not root them up?  What would you say of a man
who was so merciful to the weeds that he let them choke the flowers?
What would you say of a shepherd who was so merciful to the wolves
that he let them eat his sheep?  What would you say of a magistrate
who was so merciful to thieves that he let them rob the honest men?
And do you fancy that Christ is a less careful and just governor of
the world than the magistrate who punishes the thief that honest men
may live in safety?

Not so.  Not only will Christ punish the wolves who devour his
sheep, but he will punish his sheep themselves if they hurt each
other, torment each other, lead each other astray, or in any way
interfere with the just and equal rule of his kingdom; and this, not
out of spite or cruelty, but simply because he is perfect love.

Go, therefore, and think of Christ this Passion Week as he was, and
is, and ever will be.  Think of the whole Christ, and not of some
part of his character which may specially please your fancy.  Think
of him as the patient and forgiving Christ, who prayed for his
murderers, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.'
But remember that, in this very Passion Week, there came out of
those most gentle lips--the lips which blessed little children, and
cried to all who were weary and heavy laden, to come to him and he
would give them rest--that out of those most gentle lips, I say, in
this very Passion Week, there went forth the most awful threats
which ever were uttered, 'Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees,
hypocrites.  Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape
the damnation of hell?'  Think of him as the Lamb who offered
himself freely on the cross for sinners.  But think of him, too, as
the Lamb who shall one day come in glory to judge all men according
to their works.  Think of him as full of boundless tenderness and
humanity, boundless long-suffering and mercy.  But remember that
beneath that boundless sweetness and tenderness there burns a
consuming fire; a fire of divine scorn and indignation against all
who sin, like Pharaoh, out of cruelty and pride; against all which
is foul and brutal, mean and base, false and hypocritical, cruel and
unjust; a fire which burns, and will burn against all the wickedness
which is done on earth, and all the misery and sorrow which is
suffered on earth, till the Lord has burned it up for ever, and
there is nothing but love and justice, order and usefulness, peace
and happiness, left in the universe of God.

Oh, think of these things, and cast away your sins betimes, at the
foot of his everlasting cross, lest you be consumed with your sins
in his everlasting fire!



SERMON XII.  THE BIRTHNIGHT OF FREEDOM



(Easter Day.)

Exodus xii. 42.  This is a night to be much observed unto the Lord,
for bringing the children of Israel out of Egypt.

To be much observed unto the Lord by the children of Israel.  And by
us, too, my friends; and by all nations who call themselves FREE.

There are many and good ways of looking at Easter Day.  Let us look
at it in this way for once.

It is the day on which God himself set men FREE.

Consider the story.  These Israelites, the children of Abraham, the
brave, wild patriarch of the desert, have been settled for hundreds
of years in the rich lowlands of Egypt.  There they have been eating
and drinking their fill, and growing more weak, slavish, luxurious,
fonder and fonder of the flesh-pots of Egypt; fattening literally
for the slaughter, like beasts in a stall.  They are spiritually
dead--dead in trespasses and sins.  They do not want to be free, to
be a nation.  They are content to be slaves and idolaters, if they
can only fill their stomachs.  This is the spiritual death of a
nation.

I say, they do not want to be free.  When they are oppressed, they
cry out--as an animal cries when you beat him.  But after they are
free, when they get into danger, or miss their meat, they cry out
too, and are willing enough to return to slavery; as the dog which
has run away for fear of the whip, will go back to his kennel for
the sake of his food.  'Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast
thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?  Wherefore hast thou
dealt thus with us to carry us out of Egypt?'  And again, 'Would God
we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, where we
did sit by the flesh-pots, and eat meat to the full!'  BRUTALIZED,
in one word, were these poor children of Israel.

Then God took their cause into his own hand; I say emphatically into
his own hand.  If that part of the story be not true, I care nothing
for the rest.  If God did not personally and actually interfere on
behalf of those poor slaves; if the plagues of Egypt are not TRUE--
the passage of the Red Sea be not TRUE--the story tells me and you
nothing; gives us no hope for ourselves, no hope for mankind.

For see.  One says, and truly, God is good; God is love; God is
just; God hates oppression and wrong.

BUT if God be love, he must surely show his love by doing loving
things.

If God be just, he must show his justice by doing just things.

If God hates oppression, then he must free the oppressed.

If God hates wrong, then he must set the wrong right.

For what would you think of a man who professed to be loving and
just, and to hate oppression and wrong, and yet never took the
trouble to do a good action, or to put down wrong, when he had the
power?  You would call him a hypocrite; you would think his love and
justice very much on his tongue, and not in his heart.

And will you believe that God is like that man?  God forbid!

Comfortable scholars and luxurious ladies may content themselves
with a DEAD God, who does not interfere to help the oppressed, to
right the wrong, to bind up the broken-hearted; but men and women
who work, who sorrow, who suffer, who partake of all the ills which
flesh is heir to--they want a LIVING God, an acting God, a God who
WILL interfere to right the wrong.  Yes--they want a living God.
And they have a living God--even the God who interfered to bring the
Israelites out of Egypt with signs and wonders, and a mighty hand
and an outstretched arm, and executed judgment upon Pharaoh and his
proud and cruel hosts.  And when they read in the Bible of that God,
when they read in their Bibles the story of the Exodus, their hearts
answer, THIS is right.  This is the God whom we need.  This is what
ought to have happened.  This is true:  for it must be true.  Let
comfortable folks who know no sorrow trouble their brains as to
whether sixty or six hundred thousand fighting men came out of Egypt
with Moses.  We care not for numbers.  What we care for is, not how
many came out, but who brought them out, and that he who brought
them out was GOD.  And the book which tells us that, we will cling
to, will love, will reverence above all the books on earth, because
it tells of a living God, who works and acts and interferes for men;
who not only hates wrong, but rights wrong; not only hates
oppression, but puts oppressors down; not only pities the oppressed,
but sets the oppressed free; a God who not only wills that man
should have freedom, but sent freedom down to him from heaven.

Scholars have said that the old Greeks were the fathers of freedom;
and there have been other peoples in the world's history who have
made glorious and successful struggles to throw off their tyrants
and be free.  And they have said, We are the fathers of freedom;
liberty was born with us.  Not so, my friends!  Liberty is of a far
older and far nobler house; Liberty was born, if you will receive
it, on the first Easter night, on the night to be much remembered
among the children of Israel--ay, among all mankind--when God
himself stooped from heaven to set the oppressed free.  Then was
freedom born.  Not in the counsels of men, however wise; or in the
battles of men, however brave:  but in the counsels of God, and the
battle of God--amid human agony and terror, and the shaking of the
heaven and the earth; amid the great cry throughout Egypt when a
first-born son lay dead in every house; and the tempest which swept
aside the Red Sea waves; and the pillar of cloud by day, and the
pillar of fire by night; and the Red Sea shore covered with the
corpses of the Egyptians; and the thunderings and lightnings and
earthquakes of Sinai; and the sound as of a trumpet waxing loud and
long; and the voice, most human and most divine, which spake from
off the lonely mountain peak to that vast horde of coward and
degenerate slaves, and said, 'I am the Lord thy God who brought thee
out of the land of Egypt.  Thou shalt obey my laws, and keep my
commandments to do them.'  Oh! the man who would rob his suffering
fellow-creatures of that story--he knows not how deep and bitter are
the needs of man.

Then was freedom born:  but not of man; not of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of the will of God, from whom all
good things come; and of Christ, who is the life and the light of
men and of nations, and of the whole world, and of all worlds, past,
present, and to come.

From God came freedom.  To be used as his gift, according to his
laws; for he gave, and he can take away; as it is written, 'He shall
take the kingdom of God from you, and give it to a people bringing
forth the fruits thereof.'  'For there be many first that shall be
last; and last that shall be first.'  It is this which makes the
Jews indeed a peculiar people:  the thought that the living God had
actually and really done for them what they could not do for
themselves; that he had made them a nation, and not they themselves.
It is this which makes the Old Testament an utterly different book,
with an utterly different lesson, to the written history of any
other nation in the world.

And yet it is this which makes the history of the Jews the key to
every other history in the world.  For in it Jesus Christ our Lord,
the living God who makes history, who governs all nations, reveals
and unveils himself, and teaches not the Jews only, but us and all
nations, that it is he who hath made us, and not we ourselves; that
we got not the land in possession by our own sword, nor was it our
own strength that helped us, but thou, O Lord, because thou hadst a
favour unto us; that not to us, not to us is the praise of any
national greatness or glory, but to God, from whom it comes as
surely a free gift as the gift of liberty to the Jews of old.

I say, the history of the Jews is the history of the whole Church,
and of every nation in Christendom.

As with the Jews, so with the nations of Europe; whenever they have
trusted in themselves, their own power and wisdom, they have ended
in weakness and folly.  Whenever they have trusted in Christ the
living God, and said, 'It is he that hath made us, and not we
ourselves,' they have risen to strength and wisdom.  When they have
forgotten the living God, national life and patriotism have died in
them, as they died in the Jews.  When they have remembered that the
most high God was their Redeemer, then in them, as in the Jews, have
national life and patriotism revived.

And as it was with the Jews in the wilderness, so it has been with
them since Christ's resurrection.  They fancied that they were going
at once into the promised land.  So did the first Christians.  But
the Jews had to wander forty years in the wilderness; and
Christendom has had to wander too, in strange and bloodstained
paths, for one thousand eight hundred years and more.  For why?  The
Israelites were not worthy to enter at once into rest; no more have
the nation of Christ's Church been worthy.  The Israelites brought
out of Egypt base and slavish passions, which had to be purged out
of them; so have we out of heathendom.  They brought out, too,
heathen superstitions, and mixed them up with the worship of God,
bearing about in the wilderness the tabernacle of Moloch and the
image of their god Remphan, and making the calf in Horeb; and so,
alas! again and again, has the Church of Christ.

Nay, the whole generation, save two, who came out of Egypt, had to
die in the wilderness, and leave their bones scattered far and wide.
And so has mankind been dying, by war and by disease, and by many
fearful scourges besides what is called now-a-days, natural decay.

But all the while a new generation was springing up, trained in the
wilderness to be bold and hardy; trained, too, under Moses' stern
law, to the fear of God; to reverence, and discipline, and
obedience, without which freedom is merely brutal license, and a
nation is no nation, but a mere flock of sheep or a herd of wolves.

And so, for these one thousand eight hundred years have the
generations of Christendom, by the training of the Church and the
light of the Gospel, been growing in wisdom and knowledge; growing
in morality and humanity, in that true discipline and loyalty which
are the yoke-fellows of freedom and independence, to make them fit
for that higher state, that heavenly Canaan, of which we know not
WHEN it will come, nor whether its place will be on this earth or
elsewhere; but of which it is written, 'And I John saw the holy
city, New Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as
a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a great voice out of
heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he
will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself
shall be with them, and be their God.  And God shall wipe away all
tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither
sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain:  for the
former things are passed away.  And he that sat upon the throne
said, Behold, I make all things new.

'And I saw no temple therein:  for the Lord God Almighty and the
Lamb are the temple of it.  And the city had no need of the sun,
neither of the moon to shine in it:  for the glory of God did
lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.  And the nations of
them which are saved shall walk in the light of it; and the kings of
the earth do bring their glory and honour into it.  And the gates of
it shall not be shut at all by day:  for there shall be no night
there.  And they shall bring the glory and honour of the nations
into it.  And there shall in no wise enter into it anything that
defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination or maketh a lie:
but they which are written in the Lamb's book of life.'

That, the perfect Easter Day, seems far enough off as yet; but it
will come.  As the Lord liveth, it will come; and to it may Christ
in his mercy bring us all, and our children's children after us.
Amen.



SERMON XIII.  KORAH, DATHAN, AND ABIRAM



(First Sunday after Easter, 1863.)

Numbers xvi. 32-35.  And the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed
them up, and their houses, and all the men that appertained unto
Korah, and all their goods.  They, and all that appertained to them,
went down alive into the pit, and the earth closed upon them:  and
they perished from among the congregation.  And all Israel that were
round about them fled at the cry of them:  for they said, Lest the
earth swallow us up also.  And there came out a fire from the Lord,
and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense.

I will begin by saying that there are several things in this chapter
which I do not understand, and cannot explain to you.  Be it so.
That is no reason why we should not look at the parts of the chapter
which we can understand and can explain.

There are matters without end in the world round us, and in our own
hearts, and in the life of every one, which we cannot explain; and
therefore we need not be surprised to find things which we cannot
explain in the life and history of the most remarkable nation upon
earth--the nation whose business it has been to teach all other
nations the knowledge of the true God, and who was specially and
curiously trained for that work.

But the one broad common-sense lesson of this chapter, it seems to
me, is one which is on the very surface of it; one which every true
Englishman at least will see, and see to be true, when he hears the
chapter read; and that is, the necessity of DISCIPLINE.

God has brought the Israelites out of Egypt, and set them free.  One
of the first lessons which they have to learn is, that freedom does
not mean license and discord--does not mean every one doing that
which is right in the sight of his own eyes.  From that springs
self-will, division, quarrels, revolt, civil war, weakness,
profligacy, and ruin to the whole people.  Without order,
discipline, obedience to law, there can be no true and lasting
freedom; and, therefore, order must be kept at all risks, the law
obeyed, and rebellion punished.

Now rebellion may be and ought to be punished far more severely in
some cases than in others.  If men rebel here, in Great Britain or
Ireland, we smile at them, and let them off with a slight
imprisonment, because we are not afraid of them.  They can do no
harm.

But there are cases in which rebellion must be punished with a swift
and sharp hand.  On board a ship at sea, for instance, where the
safety of the whole ship, the lives of the whole crew, depend on
instant obedience, mutiny may be punished by death on the spot.
Many a commander has ere now, and rightly too, struck down the rebel
without trial or argument, and ended him and his mutiny on the spot;
by the sound rule that it is expedient that one man die for the
people, and that the whole nation perish not.

And so it was with the Israelites in the desert.  All depended on
their obedience.  God had given them a law--a constitution, as we
should say now--perfectly fitted, no doubt, for them.  If they once
began to rebel and mutiny against that law, all was over with them.
That great, foolish, ignorant multitude would have broken up,
probably fought among themselves--certainly parted company, and
either starved in the desert, or have been destroyed piecemeal by
the wild warlike tribes, Midianites, Moabites, Amalekites--who were
ready enough for slaughter and plunder.  They would never have
reached Canaan.  They would never have become a great nation.  So
they had to be, by necessity, under martial law.  The word must be,
Obey or die.  As for any cruelty in putting Korah, Dathan, and
Abiram to death, it was worth the death of a hundred such--or a
thousand--to preserve the great and glorious nation of the Jews to
be the teachers of the world.

Now this Korah, Dathan, and Abiram rebel.  They rebel against Moses
about a question of the priesthood.  It really matters little to us
what that question was--it was a question of Moses' law, which, of
course, is now done away.  Only remember this, that these men were
princes--great feudal noblemen, as we should say; and that they
rebelled on the strength of their rank and their rights as noblemen
to make laws for themselves and for the people; and that the mob of
their dependents seem to have been inclined to support them.

Surely if Moses had executed martial law on them with his own hand,
he would have been as perfectly justified as a captain of a ship of
war or a general of an army would be now.

But he did not do so.  And why?  Because MOSES did not bring the
people out of Egypt.  Moses was not their king.  GOD brought them
out of Egypt.  God was their king.  That was the lesson which they
had to learn, and to teach other nations also.  They have rebelled,
not against Moses, but against God; and not Moses, but God must
punish, and show that he is not a dead God, but a living God, one
who can defend himself, and enforce his own laws, and execute
judgment--and, if need be, vengeance--without needing any man to
fight his battles for him.

And God does so.  The powers of Nature--the earthquake and the
nether fire--shall punish these rebels; and so they do.

'And Moses said, Hereby ye shall know that the Lord hath sent me to
do all these works; for I have not done them of mine own mind.  If
these men die the common death of all men, or if they be visited
after the visitation of all men; then the Lord hath not sent me.
But if the Lord make a new thing, and the earth open her mouth and
swallow them up, with all that appertain to them and they go down
quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have
provoked the Lord.'

Men have thought differently of the story; but I call it a righteous
story, and a noble story, and one which agrees with my conscience,
and my reason, and my notion of what ought to be, and my experience
also of what is--of the way in which God's world is governed unto
this day.

What then are we to think of the earth opening and swallowing them
up?  What are we to think of a fire coming out from the Lord, and
consuming two hundred and fifty men that offered incense?

This first.  That discipline and order are so absolutely necessary
for the well-being of a nation that they must be kept at all risks,
and enforced by the most terrible punishments.

It seems to me (to speak with all reverence) as if God had said to
the Jews, 'I have set you free.  I will make of you a great nation;
I will lead you into a good land and large.  But if you are to be a
great nation, if you are to conquer that good land and large, you
must obey:  and you shall obey.  The earthquake and the fire shall
teach you to obey, and make you an example to the rest of the
Israelites, and to all nations after you.'  But how hard, some may
think, that the wives and the children should suffer for their
parents' sins.

My friends, we do not know that a single woman or child died then
for whom it was not better that he or she should die.  That is one
of the deep things which we must leave to the perfect justice and
mercy of God.

And next--what is it after all, but what we see going on round us
all the day long?  God does visit the sins of the fathers on the
children.  There is no denying it.  Wives do suffer for their
husbands' sins; children and children's children for whole
generations after generations suffer for their parents' sins, and
become unhealthy, or superstitious, or profligate, or poor, or
slavish, because their parents sinned, and dragged down their
children with them in their fall.  It is a law of the world; and
therefore it is a law of God.  And it is reasonable to be believed
that God might choose to teach the Israelites, once and for all,
that it WAS a law of his world.  For by swallowing up those women
and children with the men, God said to the Israelites, it seems to
me in a way which could not be mistaken, 'This is the consequence of
lawlessness and disorder--that you not only injure yourselves, but
your children after you, and involve your families in the same ruin
as yourselves.'

But there was another lesson, and a deep lesson, in the earthquake
and in the fire.  And what was this? that the earthquake and the
fire came out from the Lord.

Earthquakes have swallowed up not hundreds merely, but many
thousands, in many countries, and at many times.

Fire has come forth, and still comes forth from the ground, from the
clouds, from the consequences of man's own carelessness, and
destroys beast and man, and the works of man's hands.  Then men ask
in terror and doubt, 'Who sends the earthquake and the fire?  Do
they come from the devil--the destroyer?  Do they come by chance,
from some brute and blind powers of nature?'

This chapter answers, 'No.  They come from the Lord, from whom all
good things do come; from the Lord who delivered the Israelites out
of Egypt; who so loved the world that he spared not his only
begotten Son, but freely gave him for us.'

Now I say that is a gospel, and good news, which we want now as much
as ever men did; which the children of Israel wanted then, though
not one whit more than we.

Many hundreds of years had these Israelites been in Egypt.  Storm,
lightning, earthquake, the fires of the burning mountains, were
things unknown to them.  They were going into Canaan--a good land
and fruitful, but a land of storms and thunders; a land, too, of
earthquakes and subterranean fires.  The deepest earthquake-crack in
the world is the valley of the Jordan, ending in the Dead Sea--a
long valley, through which at different points the nether fires of
the earth even now burst up at times.  In Abraham's time they had
destroyed the five cities of the plain.  The prophets mention them,
especially Isaiah and Micah, as breaking out again in their own
times; and in our own lifetime earthquake and fire have done fearful
destruction in the north part of the Holy Land.

Now what was to prevent the Israelites worshipping the earthquake
and the fire as gods?

Nothing.  Conceive the terror and horror of the Jews coming out of
that quiet land of Egypt, the first time they felt the ground
rocking and rolling; the first time they heard the roar of the
earthquake beneath their feet; the first time they saw, in the
magnificent words of Micah, the mountains molten and the valleys
cleft as wax before the fire, like water poured down a steep place;
and discovered that beneath their very feet was Tophet, the pit of
fire and brimstone, ready to burst up and overwhelm them they knew
not when.

What could they do, but what the Canaanites did who dwelt already in
that land?  What but to say, 'The fire is king.  The fire is the
great and dreadful God, and to him we must pray, lest he devour us
up.'  For so did the Canaanites.  They called the fire Moloch, which
means simply the king; and they worshipped this fire-king, and made
idols of him, and offered human sacrifices to him.  They had idols
of metal, before which an everlasting fire burned; and on the arms
of the idol the priests laid the children who were to be sacrificed,
that they might roll down into the fire and be burnt alive.  That is
actual fact.  In one case, which we know of well, hundreds of years
after Moses' time, the Carthaginians offered two hundred boys of
their best families to Moloch in one day.  This is that making the
children pass through the fire to Moloch--burning them in the fire
to Moloch--of which we read several times in the Old Testament; as
ugly and accursed a superstition as men ever invented.

What deliverance was there for them from these abominable
superstitions, except to know that the fire-kingdom was God's
kingdom, and not Moloch's at all; to know with Micah and with David
that the hills were molten like wax BEFORE THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD;
that it was the blast of his breath which discovered the foundations
of the world; that it was HE who made the sea flee and drove back
the Jordan stream; that it was before HIM that the mountains skipped
like rams and the little hills like young sheep; that the battles of
shaking were God's battles, with which he could fight for his
people; that it was he who ordained Tophet, and whose spirit kindled
it.  That it was he--and that too in mercy as well as anger--who
visited the land in Isaiah's time with thunder and earthquake, and
great noise, and storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.
That the earth opened and swallowed up those whom God chose, and no
others.  That if fire came forth, it came forth from the Lord, and
burned where and what God chose, and nothing else.  Yes.  If you
will only understand, once and for all, that the history of the Jews
is the history of the Lord's turning a people from the cowardly,
slavish worship of sun and stars, of earthquakes and burning
mountains, and all the brute powers of nature which the heathen
worshipped, and teaching them to trust and obey him, the living God,
the Lord and Master of all, then the Old Testament will be clear to
you throughout; but if not, then not.

You cannot read your Bibles without seeing how that great lesson was
stamped into the very hearts of the Hebrew prophets; how they are
continually speaking of the fire and the earthquake, and yet
continually declaring that they too obey God and do God's will, and
that the man who fears God need not fear them--that God was their
hope and strength, a very present help in trouble.  Therefore would
they not fear, though the earth was moved, and though the mountains
be carried into the midst of the sea.

And we, too, need the same lesson in these scientific days.  We too
need to fix it in our hearts, that the powers of nature are the
powers of God; that he orders them by his providence to do what he
will, and when and where he will; that, as the Psalmist says, the
winds are his messengers and the flames of fire his ministers.  And
this we shall learn from the Bible, and from no other book
whatsoever.

God taught the Jews this, by a strange and miraculous education,
that they might teach it in their turn to all mankind.  And they
have taught it.  For the Bible bids us--as no other book does--not
to be afraid of the world on which we live; not to be afraid of
earthquake or tempest, or any of the powers of nature which seem to
us terrible and cruel, and destroying; for they are the powers of
the good and just and loving God.  They obey our Father in heaven,
without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground, and our Lord Jesus
Christ, who came not to destroy men's lives, but to save them.  And
therefore we need not fear them, or look on them with any blind
superstition, as things too awful for us to search into.  We may
search into their causes; find out, if we can, the laws which they
obey, because those laws are given them by God our Father; try, by
using those laws, to escape them, as we are learning now to escape
tempests; or to prevent them, as we are learning now to prevent
pestilences:  and where we cannot do that, face them manfully,
saying, 'It is my Father's will.  These terrible events must be
doing God's work.  They may be punishing the guilty; they may be
taking the righteous away from the evil to come; they may be
teaching wise men lessons which will enable them years hence to save
lives without number; they may be preparing the face of the earth
for the use of generations yet unborn.  Whatever they are doing they
are and must be doing good; for they are doing the will of the
living Father, who willeth that none should perish, and hateth
nothing that he hath made.'

This, my friends, is the lesson which the Bible teaches; and because
it teaches that lesson it is the Book of books, and the inspired
word or message, not of men concerning God, but of God himself,
concerning himself, his kingdom over this world and over all worlds,
and his good will to men.



SERMON XIV.  BALAAM



NUMBERS xxiii. 19.  God is not a man, that he should lie; neither
the son of man, that he should repent:  hath he said, and shall he
not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?

If I was asked for any proof that the story of Balaam, as I find it
in the Bible, is a true story, I should lay my hand on this one
only--and that is, the deep knowledge of human nature which is shown
in it.

The character of Balaam is so perfectly natural, and yet of a kind
so very difficult to unravel and explain, that if the story was
invented by man, as poems or novels are, it must have been invented
very late indeed in the history of the Jews; at a time when they had
grown to be a far more civilised people, far more experienced in the
cunning tricks of the human heart than they were, as far as we can
see from the Bible, before the Babylonish captivity.  But it was NOT
invented late; for no Jew in these later times would have thought of
making Balaam a heathen, to be a prophet of God, or a believer in
the true God at all.  The later Jews took up the notion that God
spoke to and cared for the Jews only, and that all other nations
were accursed.

There is no reason, therefore, against simply believing the story as
it stands.  It seems a very ancient story indeed, suiting exactly in
its smallest details the place where Moses, or whoever wrote the
Book of Numbers, has put it.

We, in these days, are accustomed to draw a sharp line between the
good and the bad, the converted and the unconverted, the children of
God and the children of this world, those who have God's Spirit and
those who have not, which we find nowhere in Scripture; and
therefore when we read of such a man as Balaam we cannot understand
him.  He is a bad man, but yet he is a prophet.  How can that be?
He knows the true God.  More, he has the Spirit of God in him, and
thereby utters deep and wonderful prophecies; and yet he is a bad
man and a rogue.  How can that be?

The puzzle, my friends, is one of our own making.  If, instead of
taking up doctrines out of books, we will use our own eyes and ears
and common sense, and look honestly at this world as it is, and men
and women as they are, we shall find nothing unnatural or strange in
Balaam; we shall find him very like a good many people whom we know;
very like--nay, probably, too like--ourselves in some particulars.

Now bear in mind, first, that Balaam is no impostor or magician.  He
is a wise man, and a prophet of God.  God really speaks to him, and
really inspires him.

And bear in mind, too, that Balaam's inspiration did not merely open
his mouth to say wonderful words which he did not understand, but
opened his heart to say righteous and wise things which he did
understand.

'Remember,' says the prophet Micah, 'O my people, what Balak, king
of Moab, consulted, and what Balaam, the son of Beor, answered him
from Shittim unto Gilgal, that ye may know the righteousness of the
Lord.  Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before
the high God?  Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with
calves of a year old?  Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of
rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?  Shall I give my
firstborn for my transgressions, the fruit of my body for the sin of
my soul?  He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good, and what doth
the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and
to walk humbly with thy God.'  Why, what deeper or wiser words are
there in the whole Old Testament?  This man Balaam had seen down
into the deepest depths of all morality, unto the deepest depths of
all religion.  The man who knew that, knew more than ninety-nine in
a hundred do even in a Christian country now, and more than nine
hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine in a
million knew in those days.  Let no one, after that speech, doubt
that Balaam was indeed a prophet of the Lord; and yet he was a bad
man, and came deservedly to a bad end.

So much easier, my friends, is it to know what is right than to do
what is right.

What then was wrong in Balaam?

This, that he was double-minded.  He wished to serve God.  True.
But he wished to serve himself by serving God, as too many do in all
times.

That was what was wrong with him--self-seeking; and the Bible story
brings out that self-seeking with a delicacy, a keenness, and a
perfect knowledge of human nature, which ought to teach us some of
the secrets of our own hearts.  Watch how Balaam, as a matter of
course, inquires of the Lord whether he may go, and refuses,
seemingly at first honestly.

Then how the temptation grows on him; how, when he feels tempted, he
fights against it in fine-sounding professions, just because he
feels that he is going to yield to it.  Then how he begins to tempt
God, by asking him again, in hopes that God may have changed his
mind.  Then when he has his foolish wish granted he goes.  Then when
the terrible warning comes to him that he is on the wrong road, that
God's wrath is gone out against him, and his angel ready to destroy
him, he is full still of hollow professions of obedience, instead of
casting himself utterly upon God's mercy, and confessing his sin,
and entreating pardon.

Then how, instead of being frightened at God's letting him have his
way, he is emboldened by it to tempt God more and more, and begins
offering bullocks and rams on altars, first in this place and then
in that, in hopes still that GOD may change his mind, and let him
curse Israel; in hopes that God may be like one of the idols of the
heathen, who could (so the heathen thought) be coaxed and flattered
round by sacrifices to do whatever their worshippers wished.

Then, when he finds that all is of no use; that he must not curse
Israel, and must not earn Balak's silver and gold, he is forced to
be an honest man in spite of himself; and therefore he makes the
best of his disappointment by taking mighty credit to himself for
being honest, while he wishes all the while he might have been
allowed to have been dishonest.  Oh, if all this is not poor human
nature, drawn by the pen of a truly inspired writer, what is it?

Moreover, it is curious to watch how as Balaam is forced step by
step to be an honest man, so step by step he rises.  A weight falls
off his mind and heart, and the Spirit of God comes upon him.

He feels for once that he must speak his mind, that he must obey
God.  As he looks down from off the mountain top, and sees the vast
encampment of the Israelites spread over the vale below, for miles
and miles, as far as the eye can see, all ordered, disciplined,
arranged according to their tribes, the Spirit of God comes upon
him, and he gives way to it and speaks.

The sight of that magnificent array wakens up in him the thought of
how divine is older, how strong is order, how order is the life and
root of a nation, and how much more, when that order is the order of
God.

'How goodly are thy tents, O Jacob, and thy tabernacles, O Israel!
As the valleys are they spread forth, as gardens by the river's
side, as the trees of lign aloes which the Lord hath planted, and as
cedar trees beside the waters.  His king shall be higher than Agag,'
and all his wild Amalekite hordes.  He will be a true nation,
civilized, ordered, loyal and united, for God is teaching him.

Who can resist such a nation as that?  'God has brought him out of
Egypt.  He has the strength of an unicorn.'  'I shall see him,' he
says, 'but not now; I shall behold him, but not nigh:  there shall
come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel,
and shall smite the corners of Moab, and destroy all the children of
Sheth.'  And when he looked on Amalek, he took up his parable, and
said, 'Amalek was the first of the nation; but his latter end shall
be that he perish for ever.'  And he looked on the Kenites, and took
up his parable, and said, 'Strong is thy dwelling-place, and thou
puttest thy nest in a rock.  Nevertheless, the Kenite shall be
wasted, till Asshur shall carry thee away captive.'  'Alas, who
shall live when God doeth this!'

And then, beyond all, after all the Canaanites and other Syrian
races have been destroyed, he sees, dimly and afar off, another
destruction still.

In his home in the far east the fame of the ships of Chittim has
reached him; the fame of the new people, the sea-roving heroes of
the Greeks, of whom old Homer sang; the handsomest, cunningest, most
daring of mankind, who are spreading their little trading colonies
along all the isles and shores, as we now are spreading ours over
the world.  Those ships of Chittim, too, have a great and glorious
future before them.  Some day or other they will come and afflict
Asshur, the great empire of the East, out of which Balaam probably
came; and afflict Eber too, the kingdom of the Jews, and they too
shall perish for ever.

Dimly he sees it, for it is very far away.  But that it will come he
sees; and beyond that all is dark.  He has said his say; he has
spoken the whole truth for once.  Balak's house full of silver and
gold would not have bought him off and stopped his mouth when such
awful thoughts crowded on his mind.  So he returns to his place--to
do what?

If he cannot earn Balak's gold by cursing Israel, he can do it by
giving him cunning and politic advice.  He advises Balak to make
friends with the Israelites and mix them up with his people by
enticing them to the feasts of his idols, at which the women threw
themselves away in shameful profligacy, after the custom of the
heathens of these parts.

In the next chapter we read how Moses, and Phinehas, Aaron's
grandson, put down those filthy abominations with a high hand; and
how Balaam's detestable plot, instead of making peace, makes war;
and in chapter xxxi. you read the terrible destruction of the whole
nation of the Midianites, and among it this one short and terrible
hint:  'Balaam also, the son of Beor, they slew with the sword.'

But what may we learn from this ugly story?

Recollect what I said at first, that we should find Balaam too like
many people now-a-days; perhaps too like ourselves.

Too like indeed.  For never were men more tempted to sin as Balaam
did than in these days, when religion is all the fashion, and pays a
man, and helps him on in life; when, indeed, a man cannot expect to
succeed without professing some sort of religion or other.

Thereby comes a terrible temptation to many men.  I do not mean to
hypocrites, but to really well-meaning men.  They like religion.
They wish to be good; they have the feeling of devotion.  They pray,
they read their Bibles, they are attentive to services and to
sermons, and are more or less pious people.  But soon--too soon--
they find that their piety is profitable.  Their business increases.
Their credit increases.  They are trusted and respected; their
advice is asked and taken.  They gain power over their fellow-men.
What a fine thing it is, they think, to be pious!

Then creeps in the love of the world; the love of money, or power,
or admiration; and they begin to value religion because it helps
them to get on in the world.  They begin more and more to love Piety
not for its own sake, but for the sake of what it brings; not
because it pleases God, but because it pleases the world; not
because it enables them to help their fellow-men, but because it
enables them to help themselves.

So they get double-minded, unstable, inconsistent, as St. James
says, in all their ways; trying to serve God and Mammon at once.
Trying to do good--as long as doing good does not hurt them in the
world's eyes; but longing oftener and oftener to do wrong, if only
God would not be angry.  Then comes on Balaam's frame of mind, 'If
Balak would give me his house full of silver and gold, I cannot go
beyond the commandment of the Lord.'

Oh no.  They would not do a wrong thing for the world--only they
must be quite sure first that it is wrong.  Has God really forbidden
it?  Why should they not take care of their interest?  Why should
they not get on in the world?  So they begin, like Balaam, to tempt
God, to see how far they can go; to see if God has forbidden this
and that mean, or cowardly, or covetous, or ambitious deed.  So they
soon settle for themselves what God has forbidden and what he has
not; and their rule of life becomes this--that whatsoever is safe
and whatsoever is profitable is pretty sure to be right; and after
that no wonder if, like Balaam, they indulge themselves in every
sort of sin, provided only it is respectable, and does not hurt them
in the world's eyes.

And all the while they keep up their religion.  Ay, they are often
more attentive than ever to religion, because their consciences
pinch them at times, and have to be silenced and drugged by
continual church-goings and chapel-goings, and readings and
prayings, in order that they may be able to say to themselves with
Balaam, 'Thus saith Balaam, he who heard the word of God, and had
the knowledge of the Most High.'

So they say to themselves, 'I must be right.  How religious I am;
how fond of sermons, and of church services, and church
restorations, and missionary meetings, and charitable institutions,
and everything that is good and pious.  I MUST be right with God.'
Deceiving their ownselves, and saying to themselves, 'I am rich and
increased with goods, I have need of nothing,' and not knowing that
they are wretched, and miserable, and blind, and naked.

Would God that such people, of whom there are too many, would take
St. John's warning and buy of the Lord gold tried in the fire--the
true gold of honesty--that they may be truly rich, and anoint their
eyes with eye-salve that they may see themselves for once as they
are.

But what does this story teach us concerning God?  For remember, as
I tell you every Sunday, that each fresh story in the Pentateuch
reveals to us something fresh about the character of God.  What does
Balaam's story reveal?  Balaam himself tells us in the text, 'God is
not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should
repent.  Hath he said, and shall he not do it?'

Yes.  Fancy not that any wishes or prayers of yours can persuade God
to alter his everlasting laws of right and wrong.  If he has
commanded a thing, he has commanded it because it is according to
his everlasting laws, which cannot change, because they are made in
his eternal image and likeness.  Therefore if God has commanded you
a thing, DO IT heartily, fully, without arguing or complaining.  If
you begin arguing with God's law, excusing yourself from it,
inventing reasons why YOU need not obey it in this particular
instance, though every one else ought, then you will end, like
Balaam, in disobeying the law, and it will grind you to powder.

But if you obey God's law honestly, with a single eye and a whole
heart, you will find in it a blessing, and peace, and strength, and
everlasting life.



SERMON XV.  DEUTERONOMY



(Third Sunday after Easter.)

Deut. iv. 39, 40.  Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine
heart, that the Lord he is God in heaven above, and upon the earth
beneath:  there is none else.  Thou shall keep therefore his
statutes and his commandments, which I command thee this day, that
it may go well with thee, and with thy children after thee, and that
thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth, which the Lord thy God
giveth thee, for ever.

Learned men have argued much of late as to who wrote the book of
Deuteronomy.  After having read a good deal on the subject, I can
only say that I see no reason why we should not believe the ancient
account which the Jews give, that it was written, or at least spoken
by Moses.

No doubt there are difficulties in the book.  If there had not been,
there would never have been any dispute about the matter; but the
plain, broad, common-sense case is this:

The book of Deuteronomy is made up of several great orations or
sermons, delivered, says the work itself, by Moses, to the whole
people of the Jews, before they left the wilderness and entered into
the land of Canaan; wherefore it is called Deuteronomy, or the
second law.  In it some small matters of the law are altered, as was
to be expected, when the Jews were going to change their place and
their whole way of life.  But the whole teaching and meaning of the
book is exactly that of Exodus and Leviticus.  Moreover, it is, if
possible, the grandest and deepest book of the Old Testament.  Its
depth and wisdom are unequalled.  I hold it to be the sum and
substance of all political philosophy and morality of the true life
of a nation.  The books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, grand as
they are, are, as it were, its children; growths out of the root
which Deuteronomy reveals.

Now if Moses did not write it, who did?

As for the style of it being different from that of Exodus and
Leviticus, the simple answer is, Why not?  They are books of history
and of laws.  This is a book of sermons or orations, spoken first,
and not written, which, of course, would be in a different style.
Besides, why should not Moses have spoken differently at the end of
forty years' such experience as never man had before or since?
Every one who thinks, writes, or speaks in public, knows how his
style alters, as fresh knowledge and experience come to him.  Are
you to suppose that Moses gained nothing by HIS experience?

As for a few texts in it being like Isaiah or Jeremiah, they are
likely enough to be so; for if (as I believe) Deuteronomy was
written long before those books, what more likely than that Isaiah
and Jeremiah should have studied it, and taken some of its words to
themselves when they were preaching to the Jews just what
Deuteronomy preaches?

As for any one else having written it in Moses' name, hundreds of
years after his death, I cannot believe it.  If there had been in
Israel a prophet great and wise enough to write Deuteronomy, we must
have heard more about him, for he must have been famous at the time
when he did live; while, if he were great enough to write
Deuteronomy, he would have surely written in his own name, as Isaiah
and all the other prophets wrote, instead of writing under a feigned
name, and putting words into Moses' mouth which he did not speak,
and laws he did not give.  Good men are not in the habit of telling
lies:  much less prophets of God.  Men do not begin to play cowardly
tricks of that kind till after they have lost faith in the LIVING
God, and got to believe that God was with their forefathers, but is
not with them.  A Jew of the time of the Apocrypha, or of the time
of our Lord, might have done such a thing, because he had lost faith
in the living God; but then his work would have been of a very
different kind from this noble and heart-stirring book.  For the
pith and marrow, the essence and life of Deuteronomy is, that it is
full of faith in the living God; and for that very reason I am going
to speak to you to-day.

For the rest, whether Moses wrote the book down, and put it together
in the shape in which we now have it, we shall never be able to
tell.  The several orations may have been put together into one
book.  Alterations may have crept in by the carelessness of copiers;
sentences may have been added to it by later prophets--as, of
course, the grand account of Moses' death, which probably was at
first the beginning of the book of Joshua.  And beyond that we need
know nothing--even if we need know that.

There the book is; and people, if they be wise, will, instead of
trying to pick it to pieces, read and study it in fear and
trembling, that the curses pronounced in it may NOT come, and the
blessings pronounced in it may come upon this English land.

Now these Jews were to worship and obey Jehovah, the one true God,
and him only.  And why?

Why, indeed?  You MUST understand why, or you will never understand
this book of Deuteronomy or any part of the Old Testament, and if
you do not, then you will understand very little, if anything, of
the New.

You must understand that this was not to be a mere matter of
RELIGION with the old Jews, this trusting and obeying the true God.
Indeed, the word religion, so far as I know, is never mentioned once
in the Old Testament at all.  By religion we now mean some plan of
believing and obeying God, which will save our souls after we die.
But Moses said nothing to the Jews about that.  He never even
anywhere told them that they would live again after this life.  We
do not know the reason of that.  But we may suppose that he knew
best.  And as we believe that God sent him, we must believe that God
knew best also; and that he thought it good for these Jews not to be
told too much about the next life; perhaps for fear that they should
forget that God was the living God; the God of now, as well as of
hereafter; the God of this life, as well as of the life to come.  My
friends, I sometimes think we need putting in mind of that in these
days as much as those old Jews did.

However that may be, what Moses promised these Jews, if they trusted
in the living God, was that they should be a great nation, they and
their children after them; that they should drive out the Canaanites
before them; that they should conquer their enemies, and that a
thousand should flee before one of them; that they should be blessed
in their crops, their orchards, their gardens; that they should have
none of the evil diseases of Egypt; that there should be none barren
among them, or among their cattle.  In a word, that they should be
thoroughly and always a strong, happy, prosperous people.

This is what God promised them by Moses, and nothing else; and
therefore this is what we must think about, and see whether it has
anything to do with us, when we read the book of Deuteronomy, and
nothing else.

On the other hand, God warned them by the mouth of Moses that if
they forgot the Lord God, and went and worshipped the things round
them, men or beasts, or sun and moon and stars, then poverty,
misery, and ruin of every kind would surely fall upon them.

And that this last was no empty threat is proved by the plain facts
of their sacred history.  For they DID forget God, and worshipped
Baalim, the sun, moon, and stars; and ruin of every kind DID come
upon them, till they were carried away captive to Babylon.  And this
we must think of when we read the book of Deuteronomy, and nothing
else.  If they wished to prosper, they were to know and consider in
their hearts that Jehovah was God, and there was none else.  Yes--
this was the continual thought which a true Jew was to have.  The
thought of a God who was HIS God; the God of his fathers before him,
and the God of his children after him; the God of the whole nation
of the Jews, throughout all their generations.

But not their God only.  No.  The God of the Gentiles also, of all
the nations upon the earth.  He was to believe that his God alone,
of all the gods of the nations, was the true and only God, who had
made all nations, and appointed them their times and the bounds of
their habitations.

We cannot understand now, in these happier days, all that that
meant; all the strength and comfort, all the godly fear, the feeling
of solemn responsibility which that thought ought to have given, and
did give to the Jews--that they were the people of Jehovah, the one
true God.

For you must remember that all the nations round them then, and all
the great heathen nations afterwards, were, as far as we know, the
people of some god or other.  Religion and politics were with them
one and the same thing.  They had some god, or gods, whom they
looked to as the head or king of their nation, who had a special
favour to them, and would bless and prosper them according as they
showed him special reverence, and after that god the whole nation
was often named.

The Ammonites' god was Ammon, the hidden god, the lord of their
sheep and cattle.  The Zidonians had Ashtoreth, the moon.  The
Phoenicians worshipped Moloch, the fire.  Many of the Canaanites
worshipped Baal, the lord, or Baalim, the lords--the sun, moon, and
stars.  The Philistines afterwards (for we read nothing of
Philistines in Moses' time) worshipped Dagon, the fish-god, and so
forth.  The Egyptians had gods without number--gods invented out of
beasts, and birds, and the fruits of the earth, and the season, and
the weather, and the sun and moon and stars.  Each class and trade,
from the highest to the lowest, and each city and town throughout
the land seems to have had its special god, who was worshipped
there, and expected to take care of that particular class of men or
that particular place.

What a thought it must have been for the Jews--all these people have
their gods, but they are all wrong.  We have the RIGHT God; the only
true God.  They are the people of this god, or of that; we are the
people of the one true God.  They look to many gods; we look to the
one God, who made all things, and beside whom there is none else.
They look to one god to bless them in one thing, and another in
another; one to send them sunshine, one to send them fruitful
seasons, one to prosper their crops, another their flocks and herds,
and so forth.  We look to one God to do all these things for us,
because he is Lord of all at once, and has made all.

Therefore we need not fear the gods of the heathen, or cry to any of
them, even in our utmost distress; for we belong to him who is
before all gods, the God of gods, of whom it is written, 'Worship
him, all ye gods;' and 'It is the Lord who made the heaven and the
earth, the sea and all that therein is.  Him only shalt thou
worship, and him only shalt thou serve.'  If we obey him, and keep
his commandments; if we trust in him, utterly, through good fortune
and through bad--then we must prosper in peace and war, we and our
children after us; because our prosperity is grounded on the real
truth, and that of the heathen on a lie; and all that the heathen
expect their false gods to do for them, one here and another there,
all that, the one real God will do for us, himself alone.

Do you not see what a power and courage that thought must have given
to the Jews?  Do you not see how worshipping God, and loving God,
and serving God, must have been a very different, a much deeper, and
a truly holier matter to them than the miserable selfish thing which
is miscalled religion by too many people now-a-days, by which a man
hopes to creep out of this world into heaven all by himself, without
any real care or love for his fellow-creatures, or those he leaves
behind him?

No.  An old Jew's faith in God, and obedience to God, was part of
his family life, part of his politics, part of his patriotism.  If
he obeyed God, and clave earnestly to God, then a blessing would
come on him in the field and in the house, on his crops and on his
cattle, going out and coming in; and on his children and his
children's children to a thousand generations.  He would be helping,
if he obeyed and trusted God, to advance his country's prosperity;
to insure her success in war and peace, to raise the name and fame
of the Jewish people among all the nations round, that all might
say, 'Surely this great nation is a wise and an understanding
people.'

Thus the duty he owed to God was not merely a duty which he owed his
own conscience or his own soul; it was a duty which he owed to his
family, to his kindred, to his country.  It was not merely an
opinion that there was one God and not two; it was a belief that the
one and only true God was protecting him, teaching him, inspiring
him and all his nation.  That the true God would teach their hands
to war and their fingers to fight.  That the true God would cause
their folds to be full of sheep.  That their valleys should stand
rich with corn, that they should laugh and sing.  That the true God
would enable them to sit every man under his own vine and his own
fig-tree, and eat the labour of his hands, he and his children after
him to perpetual generations.

This was the message and teaching which God gave these Jews.  It is
very different from what many people now-a-days would have given
them, if they had had the ordering of the matter, and the making of
those slaves into a free nation.  But perhaps there is one proof
that God DID give it them, and that the Bible speaks truth, when it
says that not man, but God gave them their law.

No doubt man would have done it differently.  But God's ways are not
as man's ways, nor God's thoughts as man's thoughts.

And God's ways have proved themselves to be the right ways.  His
purpose has come to pass.  This little nation of the Jews,
inhabiting a country not as large as Wales, without sea-port towns
and commerce, without colonies or conquests--and at last, for its
own sins, conquered itself, and scattered abroad over the whole
civilized world--has taught the whole civilized world, has converted
the whole civilized world, has influenced all the good and all the
wise unto this day so enormously, that the world has actually gone
beyond them, and become Christian by fully understanding their
teaching and their Bible, while they have remained mere Jews by not
fully understanding it.  Truly, if that is not a proof that God
revealed something to the Jews which they never found out for
themselves, which was too great for them to understand, which was
God's boundless message and not any narrow message of man's
invention--if that does not prove it, I say--I know not what proof
men would have.

But now I have told you that God bade these Jews to look for
blessings in THIS life, and blessings on their whole nation, and on
their children after them, if they obeyed and served him.  Does God
NOT bid us to look for any such blessings?  The Jews were to be
blessed in THIS world.  Are we only to be blessed in the next?

To that the Seventh Article of our Church gives a plain and positive
answer.  For it says that those are not to be heard who pretend that
the old Fathers, i.e. Moses and the Prophets, looked only for
transitory promises--i.e. for promises which would pass away.  No.
They looked for eternal promises which could not pass away, because
they were according to the eternal laws of God, which stand good
both for this world and for all worlds for this life and for the
life everlasting.

Yes, my friends, settle in your hearts that the book of Deuteronomy
is meant for you, and for all the nations upon earth, as much as for
the old Jews.  That its promises and warnings are to you and to your
children as surely as they were to the old Jews.  Ay, that they are
meant for every nation that is, or ever was, or ever will be upon
earth.  If you would prosper on the earth, fear God and keep his
commandments; and know and consider it in your heart that the Lord
Jesus Christ he is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath:
there is none else.  He it is who gives grace and honour.  He it is
who delivers us out of the hands of our enemies.  He it is who
blesses the fruit of the womb, and the fruit of the flock, and the
fruit of the garden and the field.  He is the living God, in whom
this world, as well as the world to come, lives and moves and has
its being; and only by obeying his laws can man prosper, he and his
children after him, upon this earth of God.



SERMON XVI.  NATIONAL WEALTH



(Fifth Sunday after Easter.)

Deut. viii. 11-18.  Beware that thou forget not the Lord thy God, in
not keeping his commandments, and his judgments, and his statutes,
which I command thee this day:  lest when thou hast eaten and art
full, and hast built goodly houses, and dwelt therein; and when thy
herds and thy flocks multiply, and thy silver and thy gold is
multiplied, and all that thou hast is multiplied; then thine heart
be lifted up, and thou forget the Lord thy God, which brought thee
forth out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage; who led
thee through that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery
serpents, and scorpions, and drought, where there was no water; who
brought thee forth water out of the rock of flint; who fed thee in
the wilderness with manna, which thy fathers knew not, that he might
humble thee and that he might prove thee, to do thee good at thy
latter end:  and thou say in thine heart, My power and the might of
mine hand hath gotten me this wealth.  But thou shall remember the
Lord thy God:  for it is he that giveth thee power to get wealth,
that he may establish his covenant which he sware unto thy fathers,
as it is this day.

I told you before that the book of Deuteronomy was the foundation of
all sound politics--as one would expect it to be, if its author were
Moses, the greatest lawgiver whom the world ever saw.  But here, in
this lesson, is a proof of the truth of what I said.  For here, in
the text, is Moses' answer to the first great question in politics,
What makes a nation prosperous?

To that wise men have always answered, as Moses answered, 'Good
government; government according to the laws of God.'  That alone
makes a nation prosperous.

But the multitude--who are not wise men, nor likely to be for some
time to come--give a different answer.  They say, 'What makes a
nation prosperous is its wealth.  If Britain be only RICH, then she
must be safe and right.'

To which Moses, being a wise lawgiver, and having, moreover, in him
the Spirit of the Lord who knoweth what is in man, makes a
reasonable, liberal, humane answer.

Moses does not deny that wealth is a good thing.  He does not bid
them not try to be rich.  He takes for granted that they will grow
rich; that the national fruit of their good government will be that
they will increase in cattle and in crops and in money, and in all
which makes an agricultural people rich.

He takes for granted, I say, that these Jews will grow very rich;
but he warns them that their riches, like all other earthly things,
may be a curse or a blessing to them.  Nay, that they are not good
in themselves, but mere tools which may be used for good or for
evil.  He warns them of a very great danger that riches will bring
on them.  And herein he shows his knowledge of the human heart; for
it is a certain fact that whenever any nation has prospered, and
their flocks and herds, and silver and gold, all that they had, have
multiplied, then they have, as Moses warned the Jews, forgotten the
Lord their God, and said, 'My power and the might of my hand hath
gotten me this wealth.'

And it is true, also, that whenever any nation has begun to say
that, they have fallen into confusion and misery, and sometimes into
utter ruin, till they repented, and turned and remembered the Lord
their God, and found out that the strength of a nation did not
consist in riches, but in VIRTUE.  For it is he that giveth the
power to get wealth.  He gives it in two ways:  First, God gives the
raw material; secondly, he gives the wit to use it.

You will all agree that God gives the first; that he gives the soil,
the timber, the fisheries, the coal, the iron.

Do you believe it?  I hope and trust that you do.  But I fear that
now-a-days many do not; for they boast of the resources of Britain
as if we ourselves had made Britain, and not Almighty God; as if we
had put the coal and the iron into the rocks, and not Almighty God
ages before we were born.

And if they will not say that openly, at least they will say, 'But
the coal, and iron, and all other raw material would have been
useless, if it had not been for the genius and energy of the British
race.'

Of course not.  But who gave them that genius and energy?  Who gave
them the wit to find the coal and iron?

God; and God gave it to us when we needed it, and not before.

Think of this, I beseech you; for it is true, and wonderful, and a
thing of which I may say, 'Come, and I will reason with you of the
righteous acts of the Lord.'

Men say, 'As long as England is ahead of the world in coal and iron
she may defy the world.'  I do not believe it; for if she became a
wicked nation all the coal and iron in the universe would not keep
her from being ruined.

But even if it were true, which it is not, that the strength of
Britain lies in coal and iron, and not in British hearts, what right
have we to boast of coal and iron?

Did our forefathers know of them when they came into this land?  Did
they come after coal and iron?

Not they.  They came here to settle as small yeomen; to till
miserable little patches of corn, of which we should be now ashamed,
and to feed cattle on the moors, and swine in the forests--and that
was all they looked to.  Then they found that there was iron,
principally down south, in Sussex and Surrey; and they worked it,
clumsily enough, with charcoal; and for more than twelve hundred
years they were here in England, with no notion of the boundless
wealth in iron and coal lying together in the same rocks which God
had provided for them; or if they did guess at it, they could not
use it, because they could not work deep mines, being unable to pump
out the water; for God had not opened their eyes and shown them how
to do it.

But just when it was wanted, God did show them.  About the middle of
the last century the iron in the Weald was all but worked out; the
charcoal wood was getting scarcer and scarcer, and there was every
chance that England, instead of being ahead of all nations in iron,
would have fallen behind other nations; and then where should we
have been now?

But, just about one hundred years ago, it pleased God to open the
eyes of certain men, and they invented steam-engines.  Then they
could pump the mines, then they could discover and use the vast
riches of our coal-mines.  Then, too, sprung up a thousand useful
arts and manufactures; while the land, not being wanted for charcoal
and firewood, as of old, could be cleared of wood, and thousands of
acres set free to grow corn.  Population, which had been all but
standing still, without increasing, has now more than doubled, and
wealth inestimable has come to this generation, of which our
forefathers never dreamed.

Now what have we to boast of in that?  What, save to confess
ourselves a very stupid race, who for twelve hundred years could not
discover, or at least use the boundless wealth which God had given
us, because we had not wit enough to invent so simple a thing as a
steam-engine.

All we should do, instead of boasting, is to bless God that he
revealed to us just what we needed, and at the very time at which we
needed it, and confess that it is HE that giveth us power to get
wealth.  It is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.

Look again at another case, even more extraordinary, which has
happened during our own times--indeed within the last ten years--the
discovery of gold in Australia.

There had been rumours and whispers of gold for years before; and
yet no one looked for gold, cared for it, hardly believed in it.
God had dulled their understanding and blinded their eyes for some
good purpose of his own.  That is what the Bible would have said of
such a matter, and that is what we should say.

And at last some man finds lying out upon the downs a huge lump of
gold--by accident (as men call it; by the special providence of God,
as they ought to call it); and at that every one starts up and
awakes, and begins looking for gold.  And now that their eyes are
opened, behold! the gold is everywhere.  Not merely in lonely
forests and unexplored mountains, but on farms where the sheep have
been pastured for years past; ay, even Melbourne streets were full
of gold, under the feet of the passengers and the wheels of the
carriages; there had the gold been all along, but men could not see
it till God opened their eyes.  Verily, verily, God is great, and
man is small.  I do not say that this was a miracle in the common
meaning of the word; but I do say that this was a striking instance
of that everlasting and special providence of the living God, who
ordereth all things in heaven and earth, from the rise of a nation
to the fall of a sparrow; and does so, not by breaking his own laws,
but by making his laws work exactly as he will, when he will, and
where he will; and I say that it is a fresh proof of the great
saying, that no man can see a thing unless God shows it to him.  For
it is the Lord who gives us power to get wealth.  It is he that hath
made us, and not we ourselves; and in him we live and move, and have
our being.

This, then, was what Moses commanded--to remember that they owed all
to God.  What they had, they had of God's free gift.  What they
were, they were by God's free grace.  Therefore they were not to
boast of themselves, their numbers, their wealth, their armies,
their fair and fertile land.  They were to make their boast of God,
and of God's goodness.

He that gloried was to glory in the Lord, and confess that a Syrian
ready to perish was their father Jacob, when the Lord had mercy on
him, and made him the head of a great tribe, and the father of a
great nation; that not themselves, but God had brought them out of
Egypt with signs and wonders; that they got not the land in
possession by their own bow, neither was it their own sword that
helped them, but that God had driven out before them nations greater
and mightier than they.

This they were to remember, because it was true.  And this we are to
remember, because it is more or less true of us.  God has put us
where we are.  God has made of us a great nation; God has discovered
to us the immense riches of this land.  It is he that hath made us,
and not we ourselves.

But more.  You will see that Moses warns them that if they forget
God, the Lord who brought them out of the land of Egypt, they would
go after other gods.

He cannot part the two things.  If they forget that God brought them
out of Egypt, they will turn to idolatry, and so end in ruin.

Now why was this?

Why should not the Jews have gone on worshipping one God, even if
they had forgotten that he brought them out of the land of Egypt?

Some people now-a-days think that they would, and that they might
have very well been what is called Monotheists, without believing
all the story of the signs and wonders in Egypt, and the passage of
the Red Sea, and the giving of the law to Moses.

Such men may be very learned; but there is one thing of which they
know very little, and that is, human nature.  Moses knew human
nature; and he knew that if men forgot that God was the living God,
the acting God, who had helped them once, and was helping them
always, and only believed about there being one God far away in
heaven, and not two, that THAT sort of dead faith in a dead God
would never keep them from idols.  They would want gods who WOULD
help them, who WOULD hear their prayers, to whom they could feel
gratitude and trust; and they would invent them for themselves, and
begin to worship things in the heavens above, and the earth beneath,
because they had forgotten their true friend and helper, the living
God.

And so shall we.  If we forget that God is the living God, who
brought our forefathers into this land; who has revealed to us the
wealth of it step by step, as we needed it; who is helping and
blessing us now, every day and all the year round--then we shall
begin worshipping other gods.

I do not mean that we shall worship idols, though I do not see why
our children's children should not do so a few hundred years hence
if we teach them to forget the living God.  There are too many
Christians at this day who worship saints, and idols of wood and
stone; and so may our descendants do--or do even worse.

But we ourselves shall begin--indeed we are doing it too much
already--worshipping the so-called laws of nature, instead of God
who made the laws, and so honouring the creature above the creator;
or else we shall worship the pomps and vanities of this world, pride
and power, money and pleasure, and say in our hearts, 'These are our
only gods which can help us--these must we obey.'  Which if we do,
this land of England will come to ruin and shame, as surely as did
the land of Israel in old time.

If we do not believe in the living God, we shall believe in
something worse than even a dead god.

For in a dead god--a god who does nothing, but lets mankind and the
world go their own way--no man nor nation ever will care to believe.

And now, nay dear friends, remember that a nation is, after all,
only the people in that nation:  you, and I, and our neighbours, and
our neighbours' neighbours, and so forth; and that therefore, in as
far as we are wrong, we do our worst to make the British nation
wrong.  If we give way to ungodly pride and self-sufficiency, then
we are injuring ourselves; and not only that, but injuring our
neighbours and our children after us, as far as we can.  And
therefore our duty is, if we wish well to our nation, not to judge
our neighbour, nor our neighbour's neighbour, but to judge
ourselves.

If we go on trusting in ourselves rather than God; if we keep within
us the hard self-sufficient spirit, and boast to ourselves (though
we may be ashamed to boast to our neighbours), 'My power and the
strength of my hands have got me this and that;' and in fact live
under the notion, which too many have, that we could do very well
without God's help if God would let us alone--then we are heaping up
ruin and shame for ourselves and for our children after us.  Ruin
and shame, I say.  We are apt to forget how easy and common it is
for God to turn the wisdom of men into folly; to frustrate the
tokens of the liars, and make the prophets mad.  How men blow great
bubbles, and God bursts them with the slightest touch.  How, when
all seems well, and men cry peace and safety, sudden destruction
comes upon them unawares.  How, when men say, 'Soul, take thine
ease, eat, drink, and be merry; thou hast much goods laid up for
many years,' God answers, 'Thou fool, this night shall thy soul be
required of thee.'

My friends, we see God doing thus in these very days by great
nations, by great branches of industry.  Look at the American war,
look at the Manchester cotton famine, and see how God can confound
the strong and cunning, and blind their eyes to the ruin which is
coming till it is come in all its might.  And then think, If it be
so easy for him to confound such as them, is it less easy for him to
confound you and me, if we begin to fancy that we can do without
him, and ask, 'Doth God perceive it?  Or is there knowledge in the
Most High?  We are they that ought to speak.  Who is Lord over us?'

Yes, in this sense God is indeed a jealous God, who will not give
his honour to another.  And a blessed thing for men it is that God
IS a jealous God, that he WILL punish us for trusting in anything
but him--will punish us for trusting in ourselves, or in our wisdom,
or in wealth, or in science, or in armies and navies, or in
constitutions and laws; in anything, in short, save the living God.

For if he left us alone to go our own way without trusting or
fearing him, we should surely go down and down (as the Chinese seem
to have gone down), generation after generation, till we became only
a mere cunning and spiteful sort of animals, hateful and hating one
another.  But when we are chastened for our folly, we are chastened
by him that we may be partakers of his holiness; that we may be his
children, looking up to him as our father, from whom comes every
good and perfect gift; the Father of Lights, with whom is no
variableness or shadow of turning; and who therefore will and can
give us, his children, light, more and more to understand those his
invariable and eternal laws, by which he has made earth and heaven;
who has given us his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, and will with him
likewise freely give us all things.



SERMON XVII.  THE GOD OF THE RAIN



(Fifth Sunday after Easter.)

DEUT. xi.  11, 12.  The land, whither ye go to possess it, is a land
of hills and valleys, and drinketh water of the rain of heaven.  A
land which the Lord thy God careth for:  the eyes of the Lord thy
God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year, even unto
the end of the year.

I told you, when I spoke of the earthquakes of the Holy Land, that
it seems as if God had meant specially to train that strange people
the Jews, by putting them into a country where they MUST trust him,
or become cowards and helpless; that so they might learn not to fear
the powers of Nature which the heathen worshipped, but to fear him
the living God.

In this chapter is another instance of the same.  They were to be an
agricultural people.  Their very worship was (if you can understand
such a thing now-a-days) to be agricultural.  Pentecost was a feast
of the first-fruits of the harvest.  The Feast of Tabernacles was a
great national harvest home.  The Passover itself, though not at
first an agricultural festival, became one by the waving of the
Paschal sheaf, which gave permission to the people to begin their
spring-harvest--so thoroughly were they to be an agricultural and
cattle-feeding people.  They were going into a good land, a land of
milk and honey and oil olive; a land of vines and figs and
pomegranates; a rich land; but a most uncertain land--a land which
might yield a splendid crop one year, and be almost barren the next.

It was not as the land of Egypt--a land which was, humanly speaking,
sure to be fertile, because always supplied with water, brought out
of the Nile by dykes and channels which spread in a network over
every field, and where--as I believe is done now--the labourer
turned the water from one land to the other simply by moving the
earth with his foot.

It was a mountain land, a land of hills and valleys, and drank water
of the rain of heaven; a land of fountains of water, which required
to be fed continually by the rain.  In that hot climate it depended
entirely on God's providence from week to week whether a crop could
grow.

Therefore it was a land which the Lord cared for--a land which
needed his special help, and it had it.  'The eyes of the Lord God
were always upon it, from the beginning of the year unto the end of
the year.'

Beautiful, simple, noble, true words--deeper than all the learned
words, however true they may be (and true they are, and to be
listened to with respect), which men talk about the laws of Nature
and of weather.  Who would change them for all the scientific
phrases in the world?  The eyes of the Lord were upon the land.  It
needed his care; and therefore his care it had.

Therefore the Jew was to understand from his first entry into the
land, that his prosperity depended utterly on God.  The laws of
weather, by which the rain comes up off the sea, were unknown to
him.  They are all but unknown to us now.  But they were known to
God.  Not a drop could fall without his providence and will; and
therefore they were utterly in his power.

'And it shall come to pass, if ye shall hearken diligently unto my
commandments which I command you this day, to love the Lord your
God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul,
that I will give you the rain of your land in his due season, the
first rain and the latter rain, that thou mayest gather in thy corn,
and thy wine, and thine oil.  And I will send grass in thy fields
for thy cattle, that thou mayest eat and be full.  Take heed to
yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside and
serve other gods, and worship them; and then the Lord's wrath be
kindled against you, and he shut up the heaven, that there be no
rain, and that the land yield not her fruit; and lest ye perish
quickly from off the good land which the Lord giveth you.'

Now the Bible story is, that this warning came true.  More than once
we read of drought--long, and severe, and ruinous.  In one famous
case, there was no rain for three years; and Ahab has to go out to
search through the land for a scrap of pasture.  'Peradventure we
shall find grass enough to save the horses and mules alive.'

And most distinctly does the Bible say that these droughts came at
times when the Jews had fallen into idolatry, and profligacy
therewith.  That is the Scripture account.  And if you believe in
the living God, whose providence ordereth all things in heaven and
earth, that account will seem reasonable and credible to you.

What special means God used to bring about these great droughts we
cannot know, any more than we can know why a storm or a shower
should come one week and not another.  And we need not know.  God
made the world, and God governs the world, and that is enough for
us.

Be that as it may, Moses goes down to the very root and ground and
true cause of the riches of the land, and of the rainfall, and of
the prosperity of the Jews, and of the prosperity of any living
nation on earth, when he says, 'Therefore shall ye lay up these my
words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon
your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes.'

'Ye shall lay up these my words in your heart and your soul, and
teach them your children when thou sittest in thine house and when
thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down and when thou risest
up.'  That is, thou shalt believe continually in a living God--a God
who is working everywhere at every moment, about thy path and about
thy bed, and spying out all thy ways; and not only about thee, but
about all that thou seest.  From him comes alike rain and sunshine;
from him comes the life of man; from him comes all which makes it
possible for man to live upon the earth.

And it is a plain fact that the Jews for a long time did believe
this--at least the prophets, psalmists and good men among them--to
the most intense degree; to a degree in which perhaps no nation has
believed it since.  With them God is everything, and man nothing.
Man finds out nothing:  God reveals it to him.  Man's intellect does
nothing:  the Spirit of God gives him understanding to do it--even,
says Isaiah, understanding to plough, and to sow, and to reap his
crops in due season.  It is the Spirit of God, according to the
prophets and psalmists, which makes the difference between a man and
a beast.  But upon the beasts too, and the green things of the
earth, and on all nature, the Spirit of God works.  He is the Lord
and giver of life.  Take only those four Psalms, the 8th, 18th,
29th, 104th, and learn from them what the old Jews thought of this
wonderful world in which we live.

'These all wait upon thee'--all living things by land and sea--'that
thou mayest give them meat in due season.  When thou givest it them
they gather it.  When thou openest thy hand they are filled with
good.  When thou hidest thy face they are troubled.  When thou
takest away their breath they die, and are turned again to their
dust.  When thou lettest thy breath go forth they shall be made, and
thou shalt renew the face of the earth.'

So again, in the world of man, God is the living Judge, the living
overlooker, rewarder, punisher of every man, not only in the life to
come, but in this life.  His providence is a special providence.
But not such a poor special providence as men are too apt to dream
of now-a-days, which interferes only now and then on some great
occasion, or on behalf of some very favoured persons, but a special
providence looking after every special act of man, and of the whole
universe, from the fall of a sparrow to the fall of an empire.

And it is this intense faith in the living God, which can only come
by the inspiration of the Spirit of God, which proves the old
Testament to be truly inspired.  This it is which makes it different
from all books in the world.  This it is, I hold, which marks the
canon of Scripture.  For in the Apocrypha--true, noble, and good as
most of it is--you do not find the same intense faith in the living
God, or anything to be compared therewith; and that for the simple
reason that the Jews, at the time the Apocrypha was written, were
losing that faith very fast.  They felt themselves that there was an
immense difference between anything that they could write and what
the old psalmists and prophets had written.  They felt that they
could not write Scripture.  All they could do was to write
commentaries about it, and to carry out in their own fashion Moses'
command, 'Thou shalt bind my words for a sign upon your hands, and
they shall be as frontlets between your eyes, and thou shalt write
them upon the doorposts of thine house.'  They were right in that;
but as they lost faith in the living God, they began to observe the
command in the letter, and neglect it in the spirit.

You know--some of you, at least--how these words were misused
afterwards; how the scribes and the Pharisees, in their zeal to
carry out the letter of the law, went about with texts of Scripture
on their foreheads, and wrists, and the hems of their robes,
enlarging their phylacteries, as our Lord said of them.  But all the
time they did not understand the texts, or love them, or get any
good from them; but only made them excuses for hating and scoffing
at the rest of the world.  They had them written only on their
foreheads, not on their hearts--an outside and not an inside
religion.  They had lost all faith in the living God.  God had
spoken, of course, to their forefathers; but they could not believe
that he was speaking to them--not even when he spoke by his only
begotten Son, the brightness of his glory, and the express image of
his person.  God, so they held, had finished his teaching when
Malachi uttered his last prophecy.  And now it was for them to
teach, and expound the law at secondhand.  There could be no more
prophets, no more revelation; and when one came and spoke with
authority, at first hand, out of the depth of his own heart, he was
to be persecuted, stoned, crucified.  No.  They had the key of
knowledge; and no man could enter in, unless they chose to open the
door.  Nothing new could be true.  John the Baptist came neither
eating nor drinking, and they said, 'He hath a devil.'  The Son of
Man came eating and drinking, and they said, 'Behold a gluttonous
man and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.'  And
meanwhile the poor, the ignorant, those whose hearts were really in
earnest, were looking out for a prophet and a deliverer--often going
after false prophets, with Theudas and Barcochab, into the
wilderness; but going, too, to be baptized with the baptism of John,
and crowding in thousands to hear our Lord preach to them of the
living God of whom Moses had preached of old; while the scribes and
Pharisees sat at home, wrapped up in their narrow, shallow book-
divinity, and said, 'This people, who knoweth not the law, is
accursed.'  Nothing new could be true.  It must be put down,
persecuted down, lest the Romans should come and take away their
place and nation.

But they did not succeed.  Our Lord and his truth, whom they
crucified and buried, rose again the third day and conquered; and
the Romans came after all, and took away their place and nation.
And so they failed, as all will fail, who will not believe in the
living God.

My friends, all these things were written for our example.  As it
was then, so may it be again.

There may come a time in this land when people shall profess to
worship the word of God; and yet, like those old scribes, make it of
none effect by their own commandments and traditions.  When they
shall command men, like the scribes, to honour every word and letter
of the Bible, and yet forbid them to take the Bible simply and
literally as it stands, but only their interpretation of the Bible;
when they shall say, with the scribes, 'Nothing new can be true.
God taught the Apostles, and therefore he is not teaching us.  God
worked miracles of old; but whosoever thinks that God is working
miracles now is a Pantheist and a blasphemer.  God taught men of old
the thing which they knew not; but whosoever dares to say that he
does so now is bringing heresy and false doctrine, and undermining
the Christian faith by science falsely so called.'

And all because they have lost all faith in the living God--the
ever-working, ever-teaching, ever-inspiring, ever-governing God whom
our Lord Jesus Christ revealed to men; in whom the Apostles, and the
Fathers, and the great middle-age Schoolmen, and the Reformers
believed, and therefore learned more and more, and taught men more
and more concerning God and the dealings of God, as time went on.

And then, when they see ignorant people running after quacks and
impostors, spirit-rappers and table-turners, St. Simonians and
Mormons, and false prophets of every kind, they will have nothing to
say but 'This people which knoweth not the law is accursed.'  While
when they see anything like new truth, or new teaching from God
appear, instead of welcoming the light, and going to meet the light,
and accepting the light, they will say, 'What shall we do?  For all
men will believe on him, and then the powers of this world will come
and take away our station and our order?'  As if Christ could not
take better care of his Church for which he died than they can in
his stead!  And so they will persecute God's servants, in the name
of God, and call upon the law to put down by force the men whom they
cannot put down by reason.

From ever falling into that state of stupid lip-belief, and outward
religion, and loss of faith in the living God:  Good Lord, deliver
us.

From all blindness of heart; from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy;
from envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness:  Good Lord,
deliver us.

From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism; from hardness of heart
and contempt of thy word and commandment:  Good Lord, deliver us.

For if people ever fall into that frame of mind (as did the scribes
and Pharisees), and the good Lord do not deliver them from it, it
will surely happen to them as it is written in the Bible.

The powers of this world will come and take away their place, and
their power, and their station:  but meanwhile the truth which they
think that they have stifled will rise again, for Christ, who is the
truth, will raise it again; and it shall conquer and leaven the
hearts of men till all be leavened; and while the scribes and
Pharisees shall be cast into the outer darkness of discontented and
hopeless bigotry, the kingdoms of the world, which they fancied were
the devil's dominion, shall become the kingdoms of God and of his
Christ, and be adopted into that holy and ever-growing Church, of
which it is written, that the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it, for in it is the Spirit of God to lead it into all
truth.

To which blessed end may God bring us, and our children after us.
Amen.



SERMON XVIII.  THE DEATH OF MOSES



(First Sunday after Trinity.)

DEUT. xxxiv. 5, 6.  So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in
the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord.  And he buried
him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Beth-peor; but no
man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

Some might regret that the last three chapters of Deuteronomy are
not read among our Sunday lessons.  There was not, however, room for
them; and I do not doubt that those who chose our lessons knew
better than I what chapters they ought to choose.  We may, however,
read them for ourselves, not only in the daily lessons, but as often
as we choose.  And well worth reading they are.

For I know of no stronger proof of the truth of the book of
Deuteronomy, and of the whole Pentateuch, than its ending so
differently from what we should have expected, or indeed wished.  If
things went in this world, as they do in novels and fables,
according to man's notion of what is right and good, then Moses and
his history would have had a very different ending.

And if the story of Moses had been of man's invention, we should
have heard--I think, from what we know of the fables, 'myths' as
they call them now, which nations have invented about themselves,
and their own early history, we may guess fairly what we should have
heard--how Moses brought the Jews into the land of Canaan, and
established his laws, and reigned over them, and died in honour and
great glory--if he died at all, and was not taken up into the skies,
and changed into a star, or into a god; and how he was buried with
great pomp; and how his sepulchre did remain among the Jews until
that day; and probably how men worshipped at it, and miracles were
worked at it, and so forth.

Also, we should have heard how, as soon as the Israelites came into
the land of Canaan, they began forthwith to serve the Lord with all
their heart and soul, as they never did afterwards, and to keep
Moses' law, while it was yet fresh in their minds, more exactly than
ever they did afterwards; and in short, we should have had one of
those stories of a 'golden age,' a 'good old time,' a pattern-time
of early purity and devotion, of which nations and Churches, of all
tongues and all creeds, have been so ready to dream in their own
case; and which they have used, not altogether ill, to rebuke vice
in their own day, by saying, 'Look how perfect your forefathers
were.  Look how you, their unworthy children, have fallen from their
faith and their virtue.'

This, I think, is what we should have been told if the Pentateuch
had been the invention of man.  This is exactly what we are NOT
told; but, on the contrary, the very opposite.

What we are told is disappointing, sad, gloomy, full of dark fears
and warnings about what the Jews will be and what they will have to
endure.  But it is far more true to human nature, and to the facts
which we see in the world about us, than any story of a good old
time would have been.

They are still wandering in the land of Moab, when the time draws
near when Moses must die.  He is a hundred and twenty years old, but
hale and vigorous still.  His eye is not dim, nor his natural force
abated.  But the Lord has told him that his death is near.  He gives
the command of the army of Israel to Joshua the son of Nun, and then
he speaks his last words.

Songs they are, dark and rugged, like all the higher Hebrew poetry;
but, like it, full of the very Spirit of God--the Spirit of wisdom
and understanding, the Spirit of faith and of the fear of the Lord.

There are three of these songs which seem to belong to those last
days of his.

The Prayer of Moses the man of God--which is our 90th Psalm, our
burial Psalm.  We all know the sadness of that Psalm; its weariness,
as of one who had laboured long, and would fain be at rest; its
confession of man's frailty--fading away suddenly like the grass;
its confession of God's strength, God from everlasting, before the
mountains were brought forth; its eternal gospel of hope and
comfort, that the strength of God takes pity on the weakness of man,
'Lord, thou hast been our refuge, from one generation to another.'

Then comes the Song of the Rock--the song of which (it seems) the
Lord said to him, 'Write this song, and teach it the children of
Israel, that it may be a witness for me against them.'

And so Moses writes; and seemingly before all the congregation of
Israel, according to the custom of those times, he chants his death-
song, the Song of the Rock.  It is such a song as we should expect
from him.  God is the Rock.  He was thinking, it may be, of the
everlasting rocks of Sinai, where God had appeared to him of old.
But God is the true, everlasting Rock, on which all things rest; the
Eternal, the Self-existent, the I Am, whom he was sent to preach to
men.  But he is a good and righteous God likewise.  His work is
perfect.  'A God of truth, and without iniquity, just and right is
he.'

In him Moses can trust, but not in the children of Israel; they are
a perverse and crooked generation, who have waxen fat and kicked.
God has done all for them, but they will not obey him.  Even in the
wilderness they have worshipped strange gods, and sacrificed to
devils, not to God; and so they will do after Moses is gone; and
then on them will come all the curses of which he has so often
warned them.  'The sword without, and terror within, shall destroy
both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of
gray hairs.  O that they were wise, that they understood this, that
they would consider their latter end!  How should one chase a
thousand; and two put ten thousand to flight?'  What a people they
might be, and what a future there is before them, if they would but
be true to God!  But they will not.  And so Moses' death-song, like
his life's wish, ends in disappointment and sadness, and dread of
the evils which are coming upon his beloved countrymen.

Lastly, he blesses them, tribe by tribe, in strange and grand words,
such as dying men utter, who, looking earnestly across the dark
river of death, see further than they ever saw amid the cares and
temptations of life.  And he blesses them.  He will say nothing of
them but good.  He will speak not of what they will be, but of what
they ought to be and can be.  But not in their own strength--only in
the strength of God.  Man is to be nothing to the last; and God is
all in all.

'There is none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the
heaven in thy help, and in his excellency on the sky.  The eternal
God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.

'Happy art thou, O Israel:  who is like unto thee, O people saved by
the Lord, the shield of thy help and who is the sword of thy
excellency! and thine enemies shall be found liars unto thee; and
thou shalt tread upon their high places.'

Those are the last words of Moses.  Then he goes up into the
mountain top, never to return; and the children of Israel are left
alone with God and their own souls, to obey and prosper, or disobey
and die.

The time of their schooling is past, and their schoolmaster is gone
for ever.  They are no more to be under a human tutor.  They are
come to man's estate and man's responsibility, and they are to work
out their own fortunes by their own deeds, like every other soul of
man.

For Moses himself must not enter into the promised land.  In spite
of all his faith, his courage, his endurance, his patriotism, he has
sinned against God, and he must be punished; and punished, too, in
kind--in the very thing which he will feel most deeply, in being
shut out from the very happiness on which he has set his heart all
along.

He who has brought the Jews to the edge of the promised land must
not have the honour and glory of taking them into it.  He must have
no honour and glory.  That must be God's alone.  Man must be
nothing, and God all in all.  Moses must die in faith, not having
received the promises, as many another saint of God has died.

And why?  To teach him and the Jews and us that man IS nothing, and
God is all in all.

Moses had given way to the very temptation which would beset such a
man.  He had spoken unadvisedly with his lips, and said, 'Hear now,
ye rebels, or ye fools, must WE bring you water out of this rock?'
WE, and not God.  He had claimed for himself the power and glory of
working miracles.  The miracles, he thought for a moment, were his,
and not God's.  And it may be that this was not the only time that
he had so sinned.  He may naturally have thought that he had some
special power and influence with God.  But be that as it may, the
Jews were trained to believe that the miracles were God's, God's
immediate work, and not performed by the wisdom or sanctity or
supernatural power of any saint or prophet whatsoever.  Let the Jews
once learn to give the honour and glory to Moses, and not to God,
and the whole of their strange education went for nothing.  Instead
of worshipping God they would begin to worship saints.  Instead of
trusting in God, they would begin to trust in men; whether on earth
or in heaven matters not.  If Moses was to have the honour and
glory, the Jews would surely grow into a superstitious, saint-
worshipping, miracle-mongering people, and come to ruin and slavery
thereby.  They were to fear God and nought else.  To trust in God
and nought else.

So Moses must vanish out of their sight, sadly and mysteriously.
All they know of him is, that he is punished for a sin which he
committed long ago, as you and I may be.  All they know of his death
and burial is, that his body was not left foully to the birds of the
air and the beasts of the field; for the Lord buried him.  They know
not how, and did not need to know.  And we need not know.  Enough
for them and for us to know that no dishonour was done to the grand
old man; that as he died far away on the lonely mountain top without
a child to close his eyes, his last look fixed upon the good land
and large which lay spread out below, of entering which he had been
dreaming for forty--it may be for more than forty--years.  Enough
for us to know that the kindly earth received his body again into
her bosom, and that the true Moses--the immortal spirit of the man--
returned to God who created him, and inspired him, and sustained him
to be perhaps the greatest man--save One who was more than man--who
ever trod this earth.

So our human feelings, like those of the Jews, are satisfied.  But
Moses is not to be worshipped by them or by us; no splendid temple
is to rise over his bones; no lamps are to burn, or priest to chant
round his shrine; no miracles are to be worked by his relics; no man
is to invoke his patronage and intercession in their prayers.  The
people whom he has brought out of Egypt are to be free--free from
the slavery of the body, free from the more degrading slavery of the
soul.

And so they go on over Jordan to fulfil their strange destiny, to
fight their way into the promised land, to root out the Canaanite
tribes, whose iniquity was full, whose sins had made them a nuisance
not to be suffered on the earth of God.  But do they go to establish
a golden age; to become a perfect people?

Nothing less.  To become, according to the book of Judges, just what
Moses foretold--an ignorant, selfish, often profligate and
disorderly people, doing each what is right in his own eyes, falling
continually into idolatry, civil war, and slavery to the heathens
round about.  Nothing more shows the truth of this history than its
humility, its continual confession of sin, its readiness to confess
the ugly truth that the Jews are a foolish, ignorant, unmanageable,
lawless, sensual race, stiffnecked and rebellious, always resisting
the Holy Spirit.  The immense difference between the Old Testament
history and that of all other nations is, that it is a history not
of their virtues, but of their sins; and a history, on the other
hand, of God's punishments and mercies.  God in the Old Testament is
all, and the Jews are nothing; and one may say that it differs from
all other histories in this, that it is not a history of the Jews
themselves at all, but a history of God's dealings with them.

If any man chooses to explain that, by saying that the story was all
invented by priests and prophets afterwards, to rebuke the people
for falling into idolatry, he must have his fancy.  Thought is free-
-for the present, at least--though it is written that for every idle
word that men speak, they shall give account at the day of judgment.
But one question I must ask, and I am sure that British common sense
and British honesty will ask it too:  If these prophets were really
good men, fearing God, and wishing to make their countrymen fear him
likewise, would it not have been a rather strange way of showing
that they feared God to tell their countrymen a set of fables and
lies?  Good men are not in the habit of telling lies now, and never
have been; for no lie is of the truth, or can possibly help the
truth in any way; and all liars have their portion in the lake which
burneth with fire and brimstone.  And that such men as the prophets
of whom we read in the Old Testament did not know that, and
therefore invented this history, or invented anything else, is a
thing incredible and absurd.

Here we have the Old Testament, an infinitely good book, giving us
infinitely good advice and good news, and news too concerning God--
God's laws, God's providence, God's dealings, such as we get nowhere
else.  And shall we believe that this infinitely good book is
founded upon falsehood? or that the good men who wrote it could
fancy it necessary to stoop to falsehood, and take the devil's tools
wherewith to do God's work?  That they may have been imperfectly
informed on some points there is no doubt; for the Bible tells us
that they were men of like passions with ourselves, and they may not
always have been true to the Spirit of God who was teaching them,
even as we are not, though he teaches us.  They only knew in part
and prophesied in part; and now that which is perfect is come, that
which is in part is done away; the mystery of Christ was not
revealed to them as it has been to us by the holy apostles and
prophets of the new dispensation, of which St. Paul says, comparing
it with the knowledge which the old Jews had when the gospel came,
That the glory of the law had no glory, by reason of the more
excellent glory of the gospel.  They may, I say, have made slight
errors in unimportant matters, though it is far more probable that
those errors have crept into the text, as the Scriptures were copied
again and again through many centuries by different scribes, of
whose perfect good sense and honesty we cannot be certain.  But who
that really values his Bible cares for them any more than he cares
for the spots on the sun which he can find through a telescope?  The
sun still shines, and gives light to the whole earth, and the Bible
still shines, and gives light to every soul of man who will read it
in reverence and faith.  But that the prophets ever invented, or
ever dared to tamper with truth, is a thing not to be believed of
men whose writings are plainly, by their own meaning and end,
inspired by the Holy Spirit of God.

One more reason--and a reason which to me is unanswerable--for
believing, like our forefathers, that the Old Testament is true.
The Old Testament, as well as the New, tells us of the 'noble acts'
of the Lord--of certain gracious and merciful and just things which
the Lord did to the children of Israel.  But if that be not true,
what follows?  That God has not done the noble acts which men
thought he had, and therefore that God is not as noble as men
thought he was; that men have actually fancied for themselves a
better God than the God who exists already.

Absurd.

Absurd, truly; and if you choose to call it by a harder name still,
you have a right to do so.

Do not you think that God must be better, not worse; more generous,
not less; more condescending, not less; more just, not less; more
helpful, not less, than man can fancy or describe?  Are not the
riches of Christ unsearchable, and the mercies of the Lord
boundless?  Is he not able and willing to do exceeding abundantly
beyond all that we can ask or think?  Did not even St. Paul say that
he only knew in part and prophesied in part?  And must it not be
true of the whole Bible what the beloved apostle St. John says of
his own Gospel, 'And there are many other things which Jesus did,
the which if they should be written every one, I suppose that even
the world itself could not contain the books that should be
written?'

Bear that in mind, remembering always that the God of the Old
Testament is the God of the New likewise; and whenever you read,
either in the Old or New Testament, of the noble acts of the Lord,
say boldly, as millions of hearts have said already, when the good
news of the Bible came to them, 'This is so beautiful that it must
be true.  The Spirit of God in the Bible, and the judgment of the
Church in all ages, bears witness with my spirit that this is true.
So ought God to have done, and therefore surely so hath God done.
Shall not the Judge of all the earth do RIGHT?'



Footnotes:

{0a}  Evidences, Part III.  Cap. iii.

{0b}  Lectures on the Jewish Church, Lect. xviii. p. 401.

{7}  I must say that all attempts to put a later date on these books
seems to me to fail simply from want of evidence.  I must say, also,
that all attempts to distinguish between 'Jehovistic' and
'Elohistic' documents (with the exception, perhaps, of the first
chapter of Genesis) seem to me to fail likewise; and that the theory
of an Elohistic and a Jehovistic sect has received its reductionem
ad absurdum in a certain recent criticism of the Psalms.





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