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Title: The Potter and the Clay
Author: Winnington Ingram, Arthur F. (Arthur Foley), 1858-1946
Language: English
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[Illustration: titlepage]
The Potter and the
Clay
By the
Right Rev.
Arthur F. Winnington Ingram, D.D.
Lord Bishop of London
The Young Churchman Co.
484 Milwaukee Street
Milwaukee, Wis.
Contents
I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE POTTER'S VESSEL 3
II. THE SPLENDOUR OF GOD 15
III. GOD THE KING OF THE WORLD 27
IV. MISSIONARY WORK THE ONLY FINAL CURE FOR WAR 40
V. GOD THE CHAMPION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 57
VI. THE KNOCKING AT THE DOOR 75
VII. IMMORTALITY 91
VIII. THE PEACE OF JERUSALEM 108
II.--TO THE CLERGY
I. MESSENGERS 123
II. PHYSICIANS 145
III. FISHERS OF MEN 160
III.--TO GIRLS
WHAT A GIRL CAN DO IN A DAY OF GOD 179
IV.--TO BOYS
THE EFFECT OF THE HOLY GHOST ON HUMAN CHARACTER 199
V.
THE WAR AND RELIGION 213
PREFACE
Another year, and we are still at War! But we must not mind, for we
must see this thing through to the end. As Mr. Oliver said in his
letter on "What we are fighting for," published this week: "We are
fighting for Restitution, Reparation, and Security, and the greatest
of these is Security." He means security that this horror shall not
happen again, and that these crimes shall not again be committed;
and he adds: "To get this security _we must destroy the power of the
system which did these things_."
Now it is clear that this power is not yet destroyed, and to make
peace while it lasts is to betray our dead, and to leave it to the
children still in the cradle to do the work over again, if, indeed,
it will be possible for them to do it if we in our generation fail.
This book, then, is an answer to the question asked me very often
during the past two years, and very pointedly from the trenches this
very Christmas Day: "How can you reconcile your belief in a good
GOD, who is also powerful, with the continuance of this desolating
War? How can we still believe the Christian message of Peace on
earth with War all around?"
It is with the hope that this book may comfort some mourning hearts,
and bring some light to doubting minds, that I send forth "The
Potter and the Clay."
A. F. LONDON.
_Feast of the Epiphany_, 1917.
I
I
THE POTTER'S VESSEL[1]
[1] Preached at St. Giles's, Cripplegate. The argument in this
sermon, stated shortly during dinner-hour in a City church, is
developed at length in the lecture which comes last in this book.
"Arise, and go down to the potter's house, and there I will
cause thee to hear My words. Then I went down to the potter's
house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the
vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the
potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to
the potter to make it."--JER. xviii. 2-4.
I suppose there is no metaphor in Holy Scripture that has been so
much misunderstood and led to more mischief than this metaphor of
the potter and the clay. Do not you know how, if any of us dared to
vindicate the ways of GOD to men, again and again we were referred
to the words of St. Paul: "Who art thou that repliest against GOD?
Shall the thing formed say to Him that formed it: Why hast Thou
made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same
lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?"
And so the offended human conscience was silenced but not
satisfied. There is no doubt that the monstrous misrepresentation
of Christianity which we call Calvinism arose chiefly from this
metaphor; and few things have done more harm to the religion of the
world than Calvinism. Those who believe that GOD is an arbitrary
tyrant who simply works as a potter is supposed to work on clay,
irrespective of character or any plea for mercy--how can such a
person love GOD, or care for GOD, or wish to go to church or even
pray? You cannot do it!
Thus there sprang up in some men's minds just such a picture of GOD
as is described by that wonderful genius, Browning. Some of you
may have read the poem called "Caliban on Setebos," in which the
half-savage Caliban pictures to himself what sort of a person GOD
is. He had never been instructed, he knew nothing; but he imagined
that GOD would act towards mankind as he acted towards the animals
and the living creatures on his island; and this is a quotation from
that poem:
"Thinketh, such shows nor right nor wrong in Him.
Nor kind, nor cruel: He is strong and Lord.
Am strong myself compared to yonder crabs
That march now from the mountain to the sea;
Let twenty pass, and stone the twenty-first,
Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.
Say the first straggler that boasts purple spots
Shall join the file, one pincer twisted off?
Say, this bruised fellow shall receive a worm,
And two worms he whose nippers end in red;
As it likes me each time, so I do: so He."
In other words, his picture of GOD was that of an arbitrary tyrant
who rejoiced in his power, who did what he liked, who enjoyed
tormenting, who would have looked down in glee upon the pictures
that have so touched us in the paper of a woman, as she taught a
Bible-class, killed by a Zeppelin bomb; and most touching of all of
the little child who, with the stump of his arm, ran in and said:
"They've killed daddy and done this to me." These things stir our
deepest feelings; but such a GOD as Caliban pictured his Setebos to
be would have rejoiced at them and laughed to see them.
No wonder that this picture of GOD which has grown up in some
minds produces absolute despair. People say, "If GOD is like that,
what is the good of my doing anything? GOD will do what He likes,
irrespective of what I do." Or, again, it produces a spirit of
fatalism: "I'm made like that! It's not my fault." Like Aaron when
reproached about the golden calf--"I cast the gold they gave me into
the fire, and there came out this calf." And all this produces in
the mind of mankind a kind of rebellion--nay, a hatred of GOD ("I
hate GOD," said a man once to me)--which makes it quite impossible
for any religion or trust or desire to pray to exist in the human
soul. It is well worth while, then, to run this metaphor of the
potter and the clay back to its source.
Here in Jeremiah is the original passage about the potter and the
clay. Now if you read for yourself this passage in the eighteenth
chapter of Jeremiah, you will find an absolutely different picture
given. If you go with Jeremiah to the potter's house you find a
humble, patient man at work dealing with refractory clay, patiently
trying to make the best he can out of it, and when he is defeated in
producing one object he makes another. If he cannot make a porcelain
vase he will make a bowl; if he cannot produce a beautiful work of
art he makes a flower-pot.
The potter has three things to notice about him. First of all, there
is his patience. Then there is the fact that he is checked in his
design by the clay at every moment. He has no arbitrary power; he
is checked because he has to deal with a certain substance. And the
last beautiful thing about the potter is his resourcefulness; he has
always got the alternative of a second best. Though something has
wrecked his first plan he has got another. This is the picture of
GOD, these are the characteristics of GOD which we are to carry away
from the potter and the clay.
1. Now just see, if this is so, what a tremendous light this throws
upon the war. There are many to-day who do not think things out
deeply, who look on this war as the breakdown of Christianity
altogether. They say: All we have been taught, why, look how vain
it is! Here are seven Christian nations at war and dragging in the
rest of the world. All you have taught us about GOD, all you say
about Christianity, is shown to be futile. We see the breakdown of
Christianity indeed.
But wait a moment. Look at the potter and the clay, and see if you
do not get some light from this. Here is the Potter, our great GOD;
the great Potter knows what is in His mind; He has in His mind a
world of universal peace. He is planning a porcelain vase in which
the world is at peace. He meant men to be all of one mind. He made
people of one blood to be of one mind in CHRIST JESUS. That is
clearly His plan, His design, and we do well to pray for--
"... the promised time
When war shall be no more,
And lust, oppression, crime,
Shall flee Thy face before."
That is His plan, that is His design, and some day He
will see it accomplished. "He shall see of the travail of His soul
and shall be satisfied."
Meanwhile, because He acts like a potter, He is defeated again and
again by the character of the clay, for He will not run counter
to the free will of the individual or of a nation. If a great
and powerful nation deliberately turns back from Christianity to
Paganism, if that nation deliberately declares regret that it took
up Christianity in the fourth century, if it has adopted the gospel
that Might is Right, if the people turn to Odin as their ideal
instead of to CHRIST, they defeat the plan of the great Potter; and
so He cannot have the porcelain vase of universal peace. You have no
right to blame GOD; it is the work of the Devil. GOD is hindered at
every moment by the Devil and all his works; you cannot therefore
blame our great and glorious GOD for the defeat of His design. The
great Potter is not to be blamed because of the refractoriness of
the clay.
But here comes the splendid resourcefulness of the great Potter.
Although He cannot get out His first design of the porcelain vase of
universal peace, He is not defeated. He has got a second-best; He
will have a beautiful bowl of universal service--a people offering
themselves out of sheer patriotism for the service of their
country. And that is what He has produced to-day. Who would have
thought that five millions of men would have volunteered to fight
for their country? Who would have thought that every woman would
feel herself disgraced if not doing something for her country as
nurse, physician, or in a canteen? Why, the spirit of service abroad
to-day among men and women is something we have not seen in our
country for a hundred years. The great Potter, then, has produced
something from the clay; He has produced the beautiful bowl of
service. Let us thank Him for that!
2. But it is not only upon the war that the picture of the potter
and the clay throws such light; it also shows what we have to
do with our country. There are some people who imagine it is
inconsistent to say two things at the same time. People blame me for
declaring two things in the same breath. One is that we never have
had such a righteous cause; that we are fighting for the freedom of
our country, for the freedom of the world; that we are fighting for
international honour, for the future brotherhood of nations; we are
fighting for the "nailed hand against the mailed fist." But, on the
other hand, are we to speak as if we had no faults of our own? Are
we to take the tone of Pharisees and say, "We thank GOD we are not
as other men, even as these Germans"? We have to admit that we have
grave national sins ourselves, and if we want to shorten the war we
have to put these national sins away. That is why we are going to
have a national mission this autumn, and we are preparing for it now.
The Church is going to preach this great national mission,
and--please GOD--our Non-conformist brethren will fall in on their
own lines and do the same. We have great national sins, and we have
to put those away if we would shorten the war. What a disgrace it is
still to have a National Drink Bill of 180 millions! What a disgrace
it is that we have not yet more thoroughly mastered immorality
in London! What shame it is that still there is so much love of
comfort, and that there are people making all they can out of the
war!
We have to get rid of all this; we must have the spirit of sacrifice
from one end of the nation to the other. We have to ask the great
Potter to remake the country, to give the Empire a new spirit.
Why was it that, when I had myself pressed a Bill to diminish the
licensing hours on Sunday from six to three--a harmless reform,
you would have thought--to give the barmen and barmaids a chance
of Sunday rest, that was shelved in the long run? Why was it that
we could not raise the age for the protection of girls even to
eighteen? There is much to be purged out of our country, and there
could be no greater calamity than for this war to end and England
still to be left with her national sins.
Therefore the great Potter must remake us. He may have to break
some nations to pieces like a potter's vessel. It is possible for
a nation to be so stiffened in national sins that there may be
nothing for it but to break it in pieces. We pray GOD that we may
not be so far gone as that, that we may still be plastic clay in the
hands of the Potter. That is our prayer, that is our ideal, to be a
new England, a new British Empire, and that GOD may use us as His
instrument in freeing the world.
3. But--and let this be my last word--we ourselves _individually_
must be re-created. Have you ever thought, brother or sister,
that the great Potter had a design for you? That, when He planned
you, He planned a devoted man who would be a powerful influence
in the world; that He planned you, my sister, to be an example of
attractive goodness. How many people have you brought to CHRIST? How
powerful a witness do you give in this city? Suppose that you, who
were meant individually to be powerful instruments in GOD'S hand,
vessels He could use, have become middle-aged cynics, or sneer at
the religion you profess to believe in, there is only one thing
to be done. You must get back to the design the great Potter had
for you. We have all some reason to admit that we have been marred
in the hands of the Potter, and to ask the Potter to make us into
another vessel as it may seem good to the Potter to make us. In this
there are only two conditions--to look up and to trust heaven's
wheel and not earth's wheel.
"Look not thou down, but up!
To uses of a cup,
The festal board, lamp's flash and trumpet's peal,
The new wine's foaming flow,
The master's lips aglow!
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what needst thou with earth's wheel?"[2]
[2] Browning. "Rabbi Ben Ezra."
We have to realise this, that we can be remade, that GOD'S power
can do anything; but that we may go on for ever as we are unless we
really put ourselves in the hands of GOD. What, then, I ask every
one of you, is to take the clay of your nature with the prayer,
"Just as I am, without one plea," and place it in the great Potter's
hands, that He may re-create you into the man or woman GOD meant you
to be. Nothing can more effectually shorten the days for our boys in
the trenches.
II
THE SPLENDOUR OF GOD
"O GOD, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places: Thou wilt give
strength and power unto Thy people. Blessed be GOD."--Ps.
lxviii. 35.
At the great Convention of all the clergy of London in Advent, 1915,
we saw reasons for thinking that what the world had been losing
sight of was the _majesty_ of GOD; the lowered sense of sin, the
neglect of worship, the uppishness of man, the pessimism of the day,
and the querulous impatience under discomfort, are all signs of the
loss of the sense of the majesty of GOD.
But I want now to go farther than this; I want to prove that the
only way to revive praise, hope, peace, sacrifice, and courage, is
to revive a belief, not only in the majesty, but in the splendour of
GOD. It was said not long ago that even good Christians believed
all the Creed except the first clause of it.
But if we leave out the first clause, "I believe in GOD," see what
happens.
1. Prayer becomes unreal. It is only a delight when it is felt to be
communion with a very noble and splendid person.
"LORD, what a change within us one short hour
Spent in Thy presence can prevail to make!"[3]
is only true if that short and glorious hour is spent with an
inspiring and glorious personality. When, like Moses, our faces
should shine as we come down from the mount.
[3] Trench.
2. Praise becomes practically impossible. Sometimes we say, "We
really must praise GOD more." But we cannot _make_ ourselves praise,
any more than we can move a boat by swinging up and down in it.
We must pull against something to make it move. What we want is
an adequate idea of the splendour of GOD. When we come in sight
of Mont Blanc or Niagara, or when we hear of some gallant deed on
the battlefield, we say "How splendid!" quite naturally. We shall
praise quite naturally when we catch sight--if only for a moment--of
the true character of GOD, or believe He has done something great.
3. Religion, which means something which _binds_ us to GOD, becomes
an uninspiring series of detailed scruples about ourselves.
Self-examination is most necessary; but it was well said by an
experienced guide of souls that, "for every time we look at
ourselves, we ought to look nine times at GOD."
Do some of you feel as I speak that your religion does not help you;
that, while you have not given up your prayers, or coming to church,
it is rather a burden than a help, or at any rate not such a help as
it might be? It is because you have lost sight of the splendour of
GOD.
4. Or, again, are you suffering from depression? You hardly know
why, but everything seems to go wrong; you seem oppressed with what
old writers called "accidie." Your will has lost its spring; the
note of your life has lost its hope and its joyousness. You drag
through life rather than "rise up with wings like an eagle" or
"run," or even "walk." This is all because you have lost faith or
never had faith in the splendour of GOD.
5. Or, on the contrary, you are busy from morning till night,
and you are too busy for prayer or church; you are immersed in a
thousand schemes for making money for yourself or for your family or
for the good of mankind. And yet, with all your business abilities,
you don't inspire people; you are conscious of a want yourself, and
other people are more conscious of it. It is simply that you are
without the one thing which matters; you are the planet trying to
shine without its sun; you are ignoring the splendour of GOD.
I. For consider how splendid GOD is! These writers of the psalms
had many limitations. They had a very inadequate belief in the life
after the grave; they knew nothing about the Incarnation; they had
no Christmas Day, Easter Day, Ascension Day, or Whit Sunday, to
inspire them. But they are bursting with glorious song, because of
their sense of the splendour of GOD. "Before the mountains were
brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art
GOD from everlasting, and world without end."
1. He is splendid, first, in His wonderful _Power_. I should not
think of arguing with you as to the existence of GOD; although, to
any thinking mind, the marvellous intricacy of the whole creation,
from the largest sun to the smallest insect, demands a Thinking
Mind; the thunder of the four hundred million consciences of mankind
demands a Righteous Person. And a Creator who is at once wise and
good is a GOD. No! it is not only His existence which should mean so
much to us, but His astonishing power.
I remember when I was at Niagara being taken down to the great
power-station, and through that power-station the power of Niagara
Falls lighted, among other things, the whole of the great province
of Ontario so that the solitary worker in some small town was
working with the light from a great power-station which he had never
seen, and in which he only, perhaps, partly believed.
But think of the Power-Station which works the whole universe; which
gives the light to twenty million suns which have been counted and
GOD knows how many which have never been seen, and yet which gives
strength to the boy far from home as he leaps across the parapet
into the battle. Well may another psalmist cry: "O GOD, wonderful
art Thou in Thy holy places: Thou shalt give strength and power unto
Thy people. Blessed be GOD."
And, surely, even if there were no other characteristic of the
splendour of GOD, this ought to encourage us more than it does. To
believe that in prayer you are in touch with unfathomable strength;
that if you co-operate with GOD you have at your disposal His
unrivalled and incomparable power--this ought to put heart into the
most timid. We understand what Archbishop Trench meant when he said:
"We kneel how weak; we rise how full of power!"
2. But the power of GOD is really only the beginning of it. The
next characteristic of the splendour of GOD is in His _Generosity_.
"Thou openest Thine Hand, and fillest all things living with
plenteousness," says the psalmist. You could scarcely get a more
beautiful description of the open-handedness of GOD, and the ease
with which GOD showers His gifts upon the world.
(_a_) When you come to think of it, there is no explanation of man's
possession of life, except the open-handedness of GOD. He simply
_gave_ him life, and there is nothing more to be said about it.
It is at present still a scientific truth that "Life only comes
from life." Life has never been yet spontaneously generated. When
men thought they had succeeded in creating life, it was discovered
that some previous germ of life had been left in the hermetically
sealed vessel. But even if, in the years to come, some sort of life
was produced from apparently dead matter, would it really have any
bearing on the age-long belief that this free, joyous life of man
and animal has come from GOD? When you ask why He gave life, there
is only one answer: That so many more living, sentient beings might
sun themselves in the sunshine of His own happiness, He opened His
Hand and life came out.
(_b_) But He was not content with giving life. He gave all the
colour of life; He painted the most glorious world out of the
riches of His marvellous imagination; every variety of flower;
every plumage of bird; every species of tree--often brought to the
best by the slow process of evolution. He gave it all; He flung it
out in all the exuberance of delight in what was "very good." He
gave colour to our own life. He gave us our warm friendships; our
keen intellectual interest in problems; the love of mother, wife,
husband, father, child. He flung it all out, like a joyous giver;
"He filled all things living with plenteousness."
(_c_) But not content with this life, He had another ready when this
was over. He knew the boys wanted life, and that this life would not
be enough to satisfy them, especially if they died early; so He had
another ready for them. And here, again, another psalmist dashes in
with his word of praise: "He asked life of Thee, and Thou gavest him
a long life, even for ever."
This is our glorious hope to-day. It is only when we have grasped
the splendour of the generosity of GOD that we can really appraise
the meanness of man.
Nearly all the ills of our life on earth--the poverty, the class
hatred, the wars--come from an unfair grasping at an unfair share of
the gifts of the generous GOD.
"They ask no thrones; they only ask to share
The common liberty of earth and air,"
some poet sang of the gipsies.
GOD gave plenty of land, and plenty of water, and plenty of air,
and if the New Testament motto had been followed, "Having food and
raiment, with these we shall have enough," the generosity of GOD
would have been mirrored in the generosity of man.
3. But even this marvellous power and generosity would not excite
the passionate love of mankind, but for His _Humility_. Power may
only awe; the merely generous Lord or Lady Bountiful, kind as they
often are, are sometimes felt to do it in a spirit of patronage and
self-pleasing; they like to be thought bountiful and kind, and have
their reward in the grateful looks and even obsequious demeanour of
the recipients of their bounty. But it is Christmas which really
stirs the blood. That this powerful, generous Being should manifest
His power and shower down His gifts was wonderful; but that He
should give Himself--this was sublime! This is what stirred heaven
to its depths--"Glory to GOD in the highest!"
The crowning splendour of GOD was His Humility. He was great when He
said, "Let there be light, and there was light." He was mighty when
He opened His Hand and filled all things living with plenteousness.
But He was greatest of all when He lay as a babe in the manger. Well
may the adoring Christian look up at Christmas and salute this third
revelation of the splendour of GOD:
"Thou didst leave Thy throne and Thy kingly crown
When Thou camest to earth for me....
Oh, come to my heart, LORD JESUS:
There is room in my heart for Thee!"
II. What, then, ought this belief in the splendid power, generosity,
and humility of GOD to produce in us?
1. It must produce Praise. It must make us say: "Praise GOD in His
holiness; praise Him in the firmament of His power."
You have caught sight of Mont Blanc and you have seen Niagara, and
you say quite naturally, "How splendid!"
2. It produces Hope. War, slaughter, misery, can't be the end, if
such a GOD exists. It may be inevitable from man's lust, ambition,
and greed; but it can't be the end--if GOD'S people work with GOD:
there must be a kingdom coming at last in which dwelleth, not
ambition, tyranny, or cruelty, but "righteousness, peace, and joy in
the HOLY GHOST."
3. It produces Peace. Once believe in the splendour of GOD, and
you get "the peace of GOD, which passeth all understanding." "Thou
wilt keep him," says the prophet, "in perfect peace, whose mind is
stayed on Thee." The world is not out of GOD'S Hand, as some people
would persuade us, nor any individual in the world. "The very hairs
of your head are all numbered," and "ye are of more value than many
sparrows."
4. And it produces answering Sacrifice and Courage. What we want
to-day is "the warrior's mind," which gives and does not heed the
cost, which fights and does not heed the wounds; and we can only be
nerved for this by the splendid self-sacrifice of GOD Himself.
If man is GOD'S child, then it must be a case of "Like Father, like
son," and the splendour of GOD must be answered by the nobility of
man. To know such a GOD is to live, to serve such a GOD is to reign;
with such a faith, death loses its sting, and the grave its terrors.
For to die is to pass into the presence of One who has shown Himself
powerful and generous and humble. And the response of the grateful
soul, with ten times the conviction of the psalmist, when he thinks
of what happened on Christmas Day, will be the same words uttered so
many thousand years ago:
"O GOD, wonderful art Thou in Thy holy places.... He will give
strength and power unto His people. Blessed be GOD."
III
GOD THE KING OF THE WORLD[4]
[4] Preached in St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, in connection
with the Annual Conference of the National Union of Women Workers.
"GOD is my King of old; the help that is done upon earth He
doeth it Himself."--Ps. lxxiv. 12.
GOD is either non-existent or His existence is the greatest fact in
the universe. Either the secularist is right, and there is nothing
but the strong hand and the keen brain of man and woman to better
the condition of world, or, if there be a Person who created the
great blazing suns that we call stars, whose imagination is so vast
that He controls the movements of history, and yet whose knowledge
is so detailed that the welfare of the smallest child in a great
city is of infinite interest to Him, then the existence of that
Person is the greatest fact in all the world. No question is so
urgent as what He thinks about a problem; nothing is so vitally
important as to know what His mind is, for instance, as to the issue
of a great war. No one is quite so foolish as the man or woman who
either plans his or her own life, or who propounds schemes for
the improvement of the world, without taking the greatest Fact in
all the world into account, or keeping in touch with what must be
on this hypothesis the ultimate Source and Fount of all power and
the Mainspring of all energy. If there be such a Person at all,
the wires might as well expect to convey a message apart from the
electric current as for the human instrument to avail without GOD.
Now, I think it is quite likely that among so many busy people,
whose brains are all full of practical schemes, there may be some
whose minds may have but little hold on GOD, and may be troubled by
doubts, such as I remember my own mind was in the days of my youth.
After all, one mind is very much like another; and in speaking to
women I have long learnt to speak as if I was speaking to men, and
in this I never found myself very much astray. If I tell you, then,
how the reality of GOD gradually dawned upon one mind, it is only in
the hope that through what may be similar clouds of vagueness and
doubt the light may shine upon another.
1. I think undoubtedly that _Nature_ was, and always will be to
most minds, the first help. It does seem more and more impossible
that the ordered universe can have been produced by chance. To use
an illustration I have often used, especially on Sunday afternoons
at the open-air meetings in the parks of East London, if a box of
letters cannot throw themselves into a play of Shakespeare because
there is clearly the mark of mind in the play, how little credible
is it that the atoms of the universe have thrown themselves into
the universe as we see it to-day! We feel inclined to add to the
trenchant questions in the Book of Job the further question: Who
wrapped the atmosphere round the earth and made life possible, and
stopped the friction? Was the beauty of the earth the surprise, or
the gift to His children of a Being with a beautiful mind? Can the
ordered course of the silent stars be produced by any amount of
juggling with chance out of the atoms of the world? In other words,
Nature drives us not only to GOD, but to a very strong GOD and a
very present GOD. If the great astronomer Herschel is right, and
every atom has the appearance of a created thing and every law of
Nature requires, as he says, the continual application of force, we
are "up against"--to use a cant phrase of the day--we are up against
the most powerful Person the world has ever known. To swing the
smallest planet on its orbit is beyond the power of the greatest
superman ever present to the brain of a megalomaniac. But to swing
twenty millions of blazing suns, and to swing them every day and
every night, and to swing them, as far as we know, for millions of
years, requires a Person of surpassing strength and most present
power, for it is clear that of this wonderful thing which is done
upon earth every day and every night "He doeth it Himself."
2. But if the philosopher Kant was right in saying that the first
thing which filled him with awe was the starry heavens without, he
went on to say that the second was the moral law within. And if the
minds of you women are like my own, the path of the discovery of
GOD lies next through the _conscience_. What is it, this indistinct
knocking, this voice, which though it can be stilled can never
be silenced? If it is only a product of mingled self-interest
and heredity, as some would uphold, why does it persistently
urge us, sometimes in almost bitter tones, against our immediate
self-interest?
Why must the boy leave his brilliant prospects and put himself under
the bullets and shells in the trenches? Why must the mother let him
go? It is only a shallow thinker, I believe, who can remain long
under the impression that the "categorical imperative," as Kant
called it, or, as we might say, this insistent, imperious voice,
can be produced by any process of evolution at all. It speaks like
the voice of a person; it argues like a person; it refuses to be
silenced like a person. And the argument is more than justified
that, if there is a Person who made the world and still carries
it on, it is more than probably the same Person who is speaking to
us in conscience. The fact that by His warnings and encouragements
He clearly cares so much for righteousness is a standing witness
that the Person who swings the stars is more than a strong and
clever devil, which the author of the material universe alone might
conceivably be, but a Person with a passion for goodness. Otherwise,
as Dr. Chalmers said, He would not have placed in the breast of
every one of His children, of every one of His created beings, a
reclaiming witness against Himself.
We have come, then, a good way out of sceptical vagueness when we
have arrived at a Person of appalling power, and yet of equally
appalling righteousness, who is thundering His will through every
conscience in the world, as though standing in the midst of the
universe and striking at the same time four hundred million gongs;
not leaving it for someone else to do, but doing it Himself.
But, alas! we are still far from loving Him, for indeed He is still
far from being lovable. Love is the only thing which we cannot
command at will and which we cannot give at will; and the world
would be in a sorry plight so far as loving GOD is concerned, if
nothing more had been done by GOD than this.
3. After all, there are many things which might make us inclined
to hate this immensely strong and righteous Person. With all His
strength and with all His righteousness, there is a terrible amount
of suffering in the world. The old question that some of your
children may have asked you who are mothers has far more in it
than appears upon the surface: "Oh, mother, why does not GOD kill
the devil?" The world is filled with injustice and cruelty, and
especially so to-day. Ypres Cathedral and the Cloth Hall, as I have
seen with my own eyes, are in ruins. So are thousands of homes in
Belgium, France, and Poland, and yet not one single thing was done
by the innocent inhabitants to deserve this fate. Who is going to
give life again to the hundreds shot in cold blood in Louvain and
Aerschott and elsewhere, and seen shot by one of the clergy of the
diocese of London; or honour again to the outraged women and girls;
or restore the dead children--born and unborn--to the mothers who
lost their children in the last Zeppelin raid? Where is the GOD of
the fatherless and of the widow? It is all very well to say, "It is
GOD in His holy habitation." But why does He sit up there in His
holy habitation while such things are being done upon earth? Is He
reclining, as Tennyson pictured the ancient gods,
"On the hills, like gods together,
Careless of mankind"?
he may stay there; but if he does, who is going to love him? whom
do we love in england to-day? is our popular hero the man who, while
he remains safe in the shelter of his home, suggests that someone
else should go and do something to save the country? for myself, if
i thought god was like that, i should not love him. browning, with
that piercing insight which has helped so many, puts the matter in a
sentence. is it possible, he asks in that great argument contained
in the poem "saul,"
"Here the parts shift,
Here the creature surpasses the Creator?"
"Would I suffer for him that I love?" cries David, as he looks with
love and pity on stricken Saul. "Would I suffer for him that I love?
So wouldest Thou, so wilt Thou." And it is an argument that no petty
quibbles can affect. For instance, if the boys in the trenches every
day and every night so give their lives for their friends; if the
mother every day so loves the world that she gives her only begotten
son, and GOD either cannot or will not, then man is greater than
GOD; then the creature surpasses the Creator; the parts in the great
drama have changed indeed.
And that brings us straight up to the New Testament, expecting the
very story--yes, asking for the very chapters--to carry on the great
witness of Nature and of conscience. And there we find the story
just as we should expect, only more so. To use Archbishop Temple's
phrase, the character depicted in the New Testament educates our
conscience instead of merely satisfying it. It is a more glorious
exhibition of the character of GOD than we had any right to ask, and
all carried out personally by Himself. The help that was brought
to earth, He brought it Himself. And just as, on a gloomy day,
when bright sunshine bursts through clouds, it changes everything,
so this revelation changes everything. It does not do away with
difficulties; it lights them up. It does not do away with suffering,
but lights it up. It is quite another thing to suffer or to see
suffering if GOD suffered. "Then I can feel the bullet tear out my
eyes and still believe," as a young officer to whom this happened
still believes. It does not do away with the crime of the men who
have wantonly produced this unnecessary war, and who have trampled
underfoot every law of chivalry and humanity in carrying it out.
But it does give great inspiration to those who die for what has
been called the nailed hand against the mailed fist. "As CHRIST died
for the salvation of the world, my two boys have died according to
their lights for the same cause. May I not think"--asked a Colonel
who lost both his sons in one week--"that CHRIST counts them as His
comrades in arms?"
And what that thought did for him it will do for others. It does
not do away with the inequalities of human life, but like a trumpet
note it summons every man and woman to come and rally round Him who
sprang into the midst of them and gave His life, and who, while
employing human minds and hearts for His work, means that the help
that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself.
What, then, has all this to say to a conference of women workers? It
suggests a warning, and flashes an inspiration to you. It suggests
a warning. It is possible that the keenest, ablest women, like the
keenest, ablest men, may make a mistake which might more clearly be
seen to be ludicrous if it were not so common, that they imagine
they can accomplish great things without GOD. History is strewn
with the failures of those who have made this tragic and hopeless
mistake. Many humble and noble souls who in infinite distress have
found faith impossible have been really in touch with this wonderful
and righteous and loving Person without knowing it, and have left
behind them on earth the work which GOD did through them, and who
acknowledge now in a clearer atmosphere that the work that they had
done He did it Himself. But the merely busy men and women, the man
or woman who deliberately believes like Nebuchadnezzar: "Is not this
great Babylon that I have built by the might of my power, and for
the honour of my majesty?" have been the failure, the laughing-stock
of the world; they have been out of touch with the Source of all
power, and wisdom, and grace, and the world, when they have passed,
will be the same as it was before.
But if it suggests a warning, what inspiration, dear sisters, it
flashes before you! not so much to do something you have never
done before, but possibly to do it in a different spirit; for the
first time in your life, perhaps, to be consciously fellow-workers
with GOD, to come again and again to GOD, and to fill yourselves
with great heartfuls of His power and love, to unite yourself in
sacramental union to Him who came to seek for the lost, to lift up
all work into a new atmosphere, and to find a joy in it which the
world can neither give nor take away.
That is the glorious prospect which opens out before us all. GOD
has no favourites; He is the same for all, and invites all to join
in the great comradeship which changes life. It is the chance of
our life to accept His offer. "The help that is done upon earth He
doeth it Himself;" and as you find the reality of that help at your
disposal more and more, day by day and year by year, you will look
up as trench after trench is taken in a power obviously not yours,
to gladly acknowledge: "Not unto us, O LORD, not unto us, but to Thy
name give the praise."
IV
MISSIONARY WORK THE ONLY FINAL CURE FOR WAR[5]
[5] Preached in Westminster Abbey on Advent Sunday.
"They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain: for
the earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the LORD, as the
waters cover the sea."--Isa. xi. 9.
It is with a pathetic wistfulness we hear described by the prophet
this Advent picture of the reign of peace, in which the wolf is
to dwell with the lamb, and the leopard to lie down with the kid,
and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and the
sucking child to play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child
to put his hand on the cockatrice' den, and in which the special
feature of the holy mountain was to be that they should not hurt
nor destroy. For we look round after nineteen hundred years of the
religion which was to bring this "peace on earth and good will
among men," and we see an outpouring of more blood and an outbreak
of viler passions than has been seen in this world for a thousand
years.
One can little wonder that the cynics scoff, and those who refuse
or fail to look below the surface speak openly of the breakdown of
Christianity, and that some of the most earnest and loving of GOD'S
children are deeply moved and disturbed. Is this beautiful picture a
Will-of-the-wisp? they ask. Is it a mirage in the desert? or are the
longing eyes of GOD'S children some day to see it realized?
I. "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain." And
first we see Belgium stabbed in the back and ravaged, then Poland,
and then Serbia, and then the Armenian nation wiped out--five
hundred thousand at a moderate estimate being actually killed;
and then as a necessary consequence, to save the freedom of the
world, to save Liberty's own self, to save the honour of women and
the innocence of children, everything that is noblest in Europe,
everyone that loves freedom and honour, everyone that puts
principle above ease, and life itself beyond mere living, are banded
in a great crusade--we cannot deny it--to kill Germans: to kill
them, not for the sake of killing, but to save the world; to kill
the good as well as the bad, to kill the young men as well as the
old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded as well as
those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant, who superintended
the Armenian massacres, who sank the _Lusitania_, and who turned the
machine-guns on the civilians of Aerschott and Louvain--and to kill
them lest the civilisation of the world should itself be killed.
And no doubt for many to-day this belief in Christianity is
trembling in the balance; the world seems to have returned to the
primitive chaos of paganism from which it came.
"There's nothing left to-day
But steel and fire and stone."[6]
[6] Kipling.
But this awful nightmare only besets those who fail to look below
the surface. Two small publications will help those who are in
this frame of mind; one is an excellent lecture by the Dean of
Westminster (Dr. Ryle), entitled "The Attitude of the Church towards
War," and the other a brilliant little book by the well-known
American writer, Owen Wister, called "The Pentecost of Calamity."
In the first it is clearly shown that, although Christianity and War
are ideally opposed to one another, and although when the world is
wholly Christian there can be no war, yet the writers of the Bible
and the Fathers of the Church have always held that, until that
ideal time arrives, a Christian man might have to go to war.
In the New Testament itself, as the Dean points out, we must balance
"They who take the sword shall perish by the sword" with the words
from the lips of the same Divine Teacher, "He that hath no sword,
let him sell his garment and buy one."
Later on, Christians are found in the Roman Army in increasing
numbers, and St. Ambrose's and St. Augustine's words quoted by the
Dean may be taken as typical of the teaching of the early Church.
"The courage which protects one's country in war against the raids
of barbarians is completely righteous," says St. Ambrose ("De
Offic.," i. 61). And St. Augustine says ("Ep.," 227): "Provided
they are really good men, those who are fighting are unquestionably
engaged in the pursuit of peace, even though the quest be prosecuted
through bloodshed."
And in Mr. Wister's brilliant essay, after a delightful picture of
Germany as it appeared to be on the surface in June, 1914, with
its efficiency, its comfort, its culture, and after especially
describing a delightful children's festival in Frankfurt to
celebrate the bicentenary of Glück, he then portrays the awful
horror which seized him and all the educated Americans who had
learnt to love their holiday in Germany, when the wild beast
suddenly appeared from among the flowers, and, to use his own words,
made his spring at the throat of an unsuspecting, unprepared world.
"Suppose a soul arrived on earth from another world, wholly ignorant
of events, and were given its choice, after a survey of the
nations, which it should be born in and belong to. In May, June, and
July, 1914, my choice," he says, "would have been, not France, not
England, not America, but Germany.
"It was on the seventh day of June, 1914, that Frankfurt assembled
her school-children in the opera-house to further their taste and
understanding of Germany's supreme national art.
"But exactly eleven months later, on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo
sank the _Lusitania_, and (this was the awful revelation) the cities
of the Rhine celebrated this also for their school-children."
He then gives the Prussian creed, sentence by sentence, compiled
from the utterances of Prussians, the Kaiser and his Generals,
professors, and editors, of which I can only quote these sentences:
"War in itself is a good thing. GOD will see to it that war always
recurs. The efforts directed towards the abolition of war must not
only be termed foolish, but absolutely immoral. The peace of Europe
is only a secondary matter for us. The sight of suffering does one
good; the infliction of suffering does one more good. This war must
be conducted as ruthlessly as possible."
Now, I do not quote this (and you will find four pages of similar
sayings) to stir up unchristian hatred of the German race, many
of whom as individuals would repudiate such sayings as their own
personal belief, but I do it to defend Christianity. I only heard
just before coming here, in the home of one of the many mourning
families I visit, that a son who had died in Germany testified in
his last letter to the great kindness with which he had been treated
in hospital.
Such teaching as this is not Christianity; this is the spirit of
Antichrist. You, poor brother and sister, who are allowing your
faith to be shattered by the war--you are not looking deep enough.
Only one nation wanted war, as the pathetic want of preparation of
every other nation proves to demonstration; only one nation has set
at naught the Christian principles which have slowly been gaining
ground in the conduct of war; and only one spirit has produced the
war, and that a spirit avowedly and in so many words passionately
opposed to the Spirit of the New Testament.
And, therefore, it is the grossest injustice to lay the blame on
religion for what has been produced by its avowed opposite, and to
talk about the breakdown of Christianity for what is due to the
revival of avowed paganism.
II. But I can imagine my distressed brethren saying: "The answer is
good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Why, after
nearly two thousand years, has Christianity not progressed farther?
Why is not the world more completely Christian? Why was the wild
beast left among the flowers? Nay, why is the wild beast still so
active in our midst? Why did the Drink Bill of our country go up
eight millions in the first six months of 1915? Why have the scenes
in the streets of darkened London been worse than they have been for
twenty years? You do not meet me fully," he says, "when you prove
that it was not Christianity which produced this war; what _I_ want
to know is why it was not strong enough to stop it."
And my answer shall be given to that, not in anger, but in sadness:
"And have you during this last twenty-five years fought the wild
beast yourself in this great city? Have you yourself practised
strict self-denial to the point of sacrifice, in dealing with the
drink question, to help the weak brethren for whom CHRIST died? Have
you crushed down the wild beast of lust in yourself, and grappled
with the haunts of vice, as many in London have done for twenty-five
years? Have you seen that there is a Mission Church among every
eight thousand people as they have come into London, and given of
your substance to plant one? Have you done your best to see that
every sailor that goes from our ports is a Christian, and that every
trader who trades throughout the world, and every bank clerk who has
been to work in Berlin or Paris, lives up to his religion? Have you
given every available penny to spread the Gospel, the failure of
which you now deplore, throughout the world? Or have you spoken of
'sending money out of the country,' of the uselessness of Christian
servants, and repeated the travellers' tales about Missions of those
who have never visited a missionary station in their lives, when you
have been asked to support Mission work abroad?"
Then, until you have done that, I refuse you the right to speak of
the weakness of the religion which you have failed to support. It is
only promised that "they shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy
mountain" when "the earth is filled with the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea."
But what if we have never really attempted to fill the earth
with the knowledge of the LORD? What if we have only very feebly
attempted to know this ourselves? What if, as a consequence of
spending less than a million a year on Foreign Missions, we are now
having to spend five millions a day on a war made necessary by the
neglect of our Christian duty?
No one believes more absolutely than I do in the righteousness of
the present war; as I have said a thousand times, I look upon it as
a war for purity, for freedom, for international honour, and for
the principles of Christianity. I look on everyone who fights for
this cause as a hero, and everyone who dies in it as a martyr; but,
at the same time, I believe that if every Christian throughout the
world had fully risen to his responsibilities and had fully lived
up to his Christianity, for the last hundred years, we might have
done more to avert it. You cannot say more than that. Slavery was
undoubtedly as much opposed as war to Christianity, but it took
eighteen hundred years to abolish that; it may take another eighteen
hundred years to abolish war. We must not hurry GOD, but we must not
fail to help Him; we can hasten the kingdom. It is no good praying
"Thy kingdom come" by itself; we must also make it come, and the
only sure way to make the kingdom come, and with the kingdom the
extinction of war, is to spread throughout the world the knowledge
of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.
We were beginning to find this out before the war.
A striking pamphlet by Canon Holland, "The White Man's Burden,"
has been published by the great Society which for two hundred years
has tried, amidst much indifference, apathy and discouragement, to
propagate the Gospel throughout the world. He showed how our skilled
and devoted Governors and statesmen throughout the world found after
a time that their ability and hard work reached a point at which
they could go no farther.
For instance, quite naturally their system of education broke down
the old beliefs of India; quite naturally the ideals and ideas of
freedom and personal responsibility which they taught produced a
desire among individuals also to be free, and a longing in every
nation to realise itself. The great statesman rubbed his eyes; he
couldn't quarrel with this result of his own teaching. But who was
to bind this transformed nation with new cords? where was he to
find the new restraints to take the place of the old ones which had
been broken through from sheer life and vigour? Where were the new
wine-skins to hold the new wine?
And, pathetically, even before the war such men were turning to
the religion which they had been partially taught at their public
school, but which in their blindness they had half despised, as
having no bearing on a practical workaday world; but, lo! practical
common sense had broken down; could the secret be, after all, in
what they had heard in their Confirmation preparation, in that
school sermon to which they had only half attended, in the prayers
which they had said rather as a matter of form ever since they were
taught them at their mothers' knees?
From end to end of the world the revelation was coming, and, as one
of those who has borne this white man's burden, Lord Selborne, in
his preface to the pamphlet, endorses what it says. There is only
one set of rules which will hold the new nation, and only one set of
wine-skins which will hold the new wine; and that is the rules of
GOD'S Commandments as interpreted and extended in the New Testament,
the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount; and the only wine-skins
which will hold the new wine are those produced by the Gospel of
the Incarnate, Risen, and Ascended CHRIST, with the miracles which
He worked believed, and the Sacraments which He gave accepted and
used. "Let the new wine be put into new wine-skins, and both are
preserved."
All this was before the war. But since the war began, just as you
see against the dark thunderclouds the brilliancy of the sunshine,
which even lights up those clouds and turns them into a glory and a
radiance themselves, so all that was chivalrous and noble in Europe
has suddenly leaped to light. Christianity has been rediscovered.
Censors have been converted by reading soldiers' letters. Many a
man who professed himself an atheist has now seen what Christianity
really means. "Even an atheist must have believed if he had seen
my father die," wrote a young officer of a father who was buried
yesterday. "Could you sing me a hymn?" asked a young officer, dying
in the last battle, of the chaplain, who in the very thick of the
shells and the bullets was at his work. And, with his arm round him,
the chaplain sang with him "JESU, Lover of my soul," until he died.
In this great Day of GOD, things are beginning to appear as they
are, and not as they are represented. "Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." That simple and
sincere Christian, the Czar of Russia, went to the heart of things
at the beginning of the war, when he gave that as the motto of the
war to his troops; and every boy since then, who, as depicted in the
picture entitled "The Great Sacrifice," has laid down his life, with
his dead hand resting on the foot of the crucifix, has sealed with
his life the great saying of Sir Henry Newbolt:
"Life is not life to him that dares not die,
And death not death to him that dares to live."
It comes round, then, to this: the Advent picture is not a mockery;
it is not a mirage in the desert; it is a true picture let down from
heaven to cheer us to-day with a prophecy of what some day shall be.
Let that picture at once encourage us while it shames us.
As we watch it, away with all those foolish old sayings about "not
believing in Foreign Missions," "sending money out of the country,"
"converting Whitechapel and Bethnal Green before we attempt China or
Japan"; for the knowledge of the LORD--before war can be no more--is
to cover the whole earth as the waters cover the sea.
But, on the other hand, let it encourage us:
"Far out of sight while sorrows still enfold us
Lies the fair country where our hearts abide,
And of its joys is nought more wondrous told us
But these few words--We shall be satisfied."
We may behold the land, although it may seem at present "very far
off."
Once crush for ever the revived paganism, which perhaps for the last
time has challenged the supreme claim of Christ to His own world;
when that is in the dust, once astonish the world by the beauty of
a chivalry and Christian manhood which shall be seen by contrast to
be as day compared to night, and light to darkness; once "placard
CHRIST" through every tribe in Africa and Asia, and preach Him
effectively in every island of the sea; and as the last hand slipped
down in death the flagstaff of the Black Flag at Omdurman, so shall
the last hand at last be lifted, in this world, of one man against
a brother-man in fratricidal strife, and the great picture shall be
true at last:
"They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain": for at
last the earth is filled with "the knowledge of the LORD, as the
waters cover the sea."
V
GOD THE CHAMPION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS[7]
[7] Preached in St. Martin's-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Day, 1915.
"O LORD, Thou hast been our refuge from one generation to
another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the
earth and the world were made, Thou art GOD from everlasting and
world without end."--Ps. xc. 1, 2.
The story is told of Archbishop Temple that as he was walking away
from the House of Lords, after the defeat of the Bill he had brought
in for the advancement of Temperance, some well-meaning person was
endeavouring to comfort him in his natural disappointment, although,
needless to say, he was himself as strong and brave and confident
as ever. Was he looking, asked the questioner, to the verdict of
posterity? No. Was he looking to the gradual change of public
opinion? No. Was he looking to a verdict in another House which
would influence the opinion of the house which he had just left? No.
What was it he looked to, then? "I look to GOD."
It was the answer of a true, brave, and believing Christian man;
if the GOD of the Christians exists at all, He is so strong and so
powerful and so wise that to be on His side is worth all other aid
in the world, and to defy GOD, apart from its blasphemy, is the most
colossal mistake which can be made.
There is a sense, of course, in which the cynic was right when he
said that GOD is on the side of the strongest battalions, for the
raising of those battalions means a self-sacrifice and a self-denial
which GOD honours and recognizes; but to imagine that those
battalions by themselves represent GOD, and can be used successfully
to further causes which GOD has beforehand denounced and proclaimed,
is to make, in the long-run, the mistake of the ages.
Now we are keeping Trafalgar Day in a most critical week of the
greatest war waged in the world for a thousand years. I have visited
the long battle-line mile by mile in Flanders. I have also seen the
grey Dreadnoughts watching, watching, watching day and night; it is
idle bluster for the enemy to say that the ships of the Fleet are
hiding from them; they know only too well where to find them when
they want to meet them. As in great Nelson's day, the Fleet is the
girdle of the Empire; the seas which Nelson swept are clear to-day;
not an enemy flag dare show itself from one hemisphere to the other;
under the mighty ægis of the Grand Fleet, transports in hundreds
carry troops all over the world, food-ships pour in from every
port; even when the submarine danger was formidable there was no
appreciable slackening of the wonderfully brave mercantile marine,
and now that the Navy has that peril, too, well in hand, men sail
the seas to-day, except for the necessary restrictions with regard
to contraband, with greater freedom and security than they sailed
the seas long after the Battle of Trafalgar.
In this great conflict on what are we to found our hopes? To
what are we to look? Are we to trust only to the strength of our
battleships and the perfect training of our sailors? Are we to
look to the new armies produced with such marvellous skill by Lord
Kitchener's patient hand? Are we to look to the three millions whose
services will be asked for, and no doubt offered, in the next six
weeks? No doubt we are to look to all these things; GOD does only
help those who help themselves. But, standing before you as your
Bishop, I tell you frankly that my belief in the final victory of
our arms is founded on something far beyond these things. I am full
of unshakable confidence and hope, because, like Archbishop Temple,
I look to GOD. I try to say with the psalmist every morning:
"And now, LORD, what is my hope?
Truly my hope is in Thee."
"LORD, Thou had been our refuge from
one generation to another."
Notice I do not claim that GOD is some tribal deity who with partial
favouritism supports our side; but I claim, with the great Lincoln,
that we are on the side of GOD.
1. I do so in the first place (and this comes out the more clearly
the more you study the previous history of the question), because
this is a wantonly provoked war, planned and desired and finally
launched by one Power, and one Power alone--that is, Germany.
Now, if GOD is a God who "makes men to be of one mind in a house,"
if He made of one blood every nation in the world, and meant them
to dwell at peace together; if the teaching of CHRIST is really the
teaching of GOD'S own SON--then the nation which wantonly plans and
provokes war, and war on such a scale, must be against GOD.
You have only to read two such books as "J'Accuse," said to be
written by a German, and "Ordeal by Battle," by Mr. Oliver, to
see that this is no idle assertion or party statement, but the
literal truth. If I mistake not, "J'Accuse" will be for all time
the accusing finger of the civilised world pointing at Germany as
Nathan pointed at David, saying, "Thou art the man"; and as to
"Ordeal by Battle," while it suggests many political questions which
I should not think of discussing here and now, as to why we were
so unprepared after the warnings given us, the fact stands out as
plainly as daylight that Russia, France, and Great Britain one and
all made every effort short of national dishonour to keep the peace.
This, then, is my first ground for claiming that we are on the side
of GOD. Those who wantonly provoke war act against GOD, and those
who honestly try to prevent war act on His side. But this is only
the beginning of the matter.
2. There has always, up to now, been a kind of chivalry in war
which has lighted up the more terrible aspects of it. All through
history there have been bright flashes of this chivalry even
among non-Christians: the conduct of Saladin in the Crusades, the
chivalrous bearing of the Black Prince to the captured French King,
and many similar incidents, testify to the fact that you need not
cease to be a Christian or a gentleman because you have to fight.
Many of these laws of chivalry were embodied by the great Christian
nations in the Hague Convention; certain modes of warfare were not
to be allowed; women and children must be tenderly and chivalrously
treated; the wounded of the other side must be treated as fallen
comrades; the dead must be decently buried; the Red Cross must be
respected; civilians must be spared; the rights of neutrals guarded.
No one can doubt that GOD must have approved of such humane
regulations, for they are all founded upon the New Testament; they
are a softening, and a valuable softening, of the horrors of war.
All other nations began the war by scrupulously respecting them:
Mr. Stanley Washburn, who has closely followed the Russian armies,
described the kindness and consideration which they displayed to the
peasantry of Poland; our own soldiers have never even been accused
by the enemy of violating any of them, and one of the Generals at
the Front told me with pride that, though his great brigade had been
out from the beginning, no accusation of injuring a French woman or
girl had been brought against a single member of it.
But, on the other hand, while time shall last the iniquities
committed in Belgium by the Germans, as attested by Lord Bryce's
Committee, will ring through history; the very invasion of
Belgium itself was a breach of international faith. A friend of
mine saw with his own eyes, while a prisoner among the Germans,
forty civilians shot in cold blood in one town alone; the gallant
Cardinal-Archbishop Mercier has recorded a damning list of other
murders in his famous charge. The sinking of the _Lusitania_ will
always stand out as one of the greatest crimes in history, although,
if I am not mistaken, the judicial murder of a poor Englishwoman[8]
for harbouring some poor refugees will run it hard in the opinion
of the civilised world. There is one thing about that last incident
which perhaps was not taken into account by those who perpetrated
the crime: it will settle the matter once for all about recruiting
in Great Britain; there will be no need now of compulsion.
[8] This was preached the day after the judicial murder of Nurse
Cavell.
I wonder what Nelson would have said if he had been told that an
Englishwoman had been shot in cold blood by a member of any other
nation; he would have made more than the diplomatic inquiries which
have been made by a great neutral nation into this crime, right
and proper as those inquiries are. He would have made his inquiries
with the thunder of the guns of the British Fleet, and pressed the
question home with the Nelson touch which won Trafalgar, as indeed
our Fleet at this moment is only too ready to do. But is it possible
that there is one young man in England to-day who will sit still
under this monstrous wrong?
There is a famous old rhyme which has come down from the time of
the imprisonment of the seven Bishops who risked their lives for
the liberties of Britain, as, please God, the Bishops of to-day are
still prepared to do:
"And shall they scorn Tre, Pol, and Pen,
And shall Trelawny die?
There's twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why."
The spirit of Nelson must indeed have died out of our young men,
which it certainly has not, if the answer is not the same to-day;
the three millions of new recruits asked for will be there. Why was
she put to death? Why was she murdered? Three thousand thousand
Englishmen--ay, and Scotsmen and Irishmen, too--will know the reason
why.
My second reason, then, for trusting to GOD is that, according
to the whole revelation of His character and will, His curse is
on the nation, however disciplined and efficient, that tramples
underfoot and openly defies the laws of chivalry which once relieved
the horrors of war; and that His ultimate blessing must be upon
the nation or nations which, however foolishly unprepared, and
therefore, for a time, suffering from the want of preparation, in
the main are fighting for the weak against the strong.
3. But if this is the negative side what about the positive? I am
almost ashamed to ask and answer the question in public again, "For
what are we fighting?" If we are fighting for the freedom of the
world, for the right to live for the small nations of the earth, for
nationality against pan-German tyranny, for international honour as
the essential condition of a future brotherhood of nations, then the
GOD who has been the refuge from generation to generation of the
down-trodden and oppressed, who planted in us the love of liberty,
and who has been the champion of the free, must be the God on whose
side we are to-day.
4. We are right, then, to look for victory and help to a GOD who
through one generation to another has shown Himself a lover of
peace and chivalry and mercy and liberty, against a delight in war,
against brutality and massacre and tyranny; yet we should have
ill-read the lessons of Trafalgar Day if we were to stop here.
Nelson never dreamt that GOD was on his side in the sense that
he could relax for an instant his vigilance, or ruin his whole
settled plan by impatience, or win a final victory without the
self-sacrifice and trust of the nation behind him. If we do look to
GOD, then we must remember this bracing fact that "GOD helps those
who help themselves."
It is a far-reaching saying that the children of this world are in
their generation wiser than the children of light; certainly it is a
formidable fact to be faced that for a thoroughly bad cause, carried
out in a thoroughly bad way, the authors of this greatest crime
in history have succeeded in evoking from the hard-working people
of Germany, who are under the impression, doubtless, that they are
"saving the Fatherland," a far more universal spirit of organised
and efficient self-sacrifice than in the most glorious cause ever
entrusted to man has yet[9] been evoked from all in these islands.
It was one of our great statesmen who truly said that he feared
what he called the "potato spirit" in Germany more than all their
guns and shells--the spirit, that is, which was content with potato
bread, content to make any sacrifice, if only their cause would be
victorious; and it is unwise as well as ungenerous not to recognise
the gallantry with which both the individual sailors and soldiers of
the enemy have fought.
[9] This sermon was preached in 1915. There has been a great
improvement in 1916.
To look to GOD, then, puts a great responsibility upon those who do
so; it means to rise to the level of the sacrifice of GOD. If it is
true that, as you will remember, another great English statesman
once quoted on a famous occasion, "Who sups with the devil must
have a long spoon," then, Who fights with GOD must have a high
standard. Is this a time, asked the prophet of the trembling Gehazi,
to receive oliveyards, vineyards, menservants and maidservants? Is
this a time, we may ask to-day, to haunt night clubs[10] or to spend
separation allowances in drinking? Is this a time to ignore Sunday
and turn your back upon GOD's House of Prayer? Is this a time to
spend anything which can be saved for the nation on personal comfort
or extravagant dress? The nation that looks to GOD must come back to
GOD; it must come back to GOD at once and come back to Him for good;
it is a question whether we at home have yet as a nation deserved
the victory which our righteous cause demands. The sailors of the
Fleet have deserved it; the soldiers in the trenches have earned
it; and when the nation at home has equally deserved it, all will
receive together their well-merited reward.
[10] Shortly after this night clubs were abolished.
5. But more than this; those that look to GOD must definitely and
persistently seek GOD's help. How many of those here to-day pray
earnestly and persistently to GOD for help and grace? How many plead
in the greatest service of all the one Great Sacrifice, once offered
for the sins of the whole world?
"Look, FATHER, look on His anointed Face,
And only look on us as found in Him;
Look not on our misusings of Thy grace,
Our prayer so languid and our faith so dim:
For, lo! between our sins and their reward
We set the Passion of Thy SON our LORD."
How constantly the faith of our fellow-countrymen amounts to little
more than a vague Deism, instead of a living faith in an Incarnate
CHRIST. They are learning more than that in the trenches, and I hope
also that the same truth is being revealed to those who remain in
the broad sea. These beautiful lines, entitled "CHRIST in Flanders,"
the Editor of the _Spectator_ gave me leave to reproduce in the
diocesan magazine:
"We had forgotten You, or very nearly--
You did not seem to touch us very nearly.
Of course we thought about You now and then,
Especially in any time of trouble:
We knew that You were good in time of trouble--
But we are very ordinary men.
"And there were always other things to think of--
There's lots of things a man has got to think of--
His work, his home, his pleasure, and his wife;
And so we only thought of You on Sunday--
Sometimes, perhaps, not even on a Sunday--
Because there's always lots to fill one's life.
"And, all the while, in street or lane or byway--
In country lane, in city street or byway--
You walked among us, and we did not see.
Your feet were bleeding as You walked our pavements--
How _did_ we miss Your footprints on our pavements--
Can there be other folk as blind as we?
"_Now_ we remember, over here in Flanders--
(It isn't strange to think of You in Flanders)--
This hideous warfare seems to make things clear.
We never thought about You much in England--
But now that we are far away from England,
We have no doubts, we know that You are here.
"You helped us pass the jest along the trenches--
Where, in cold blood, we waited in the trenches--
You touched its ribaldry and made it fine.
You stood beside us in our pain and weakness--
We're glad to think You understood our weakness;
Somehow it seems to help us not to whine.
"We think about You kneeling in the Garden--
Ah, GOD! the agony of that dread Garden--
We know You prayed for us upon the Cross.
If anything could make us glad to bear it,
'Twould be the knowledge that You willed to bear it--
Pain--death--the uttermost of human loss.
"Though we forgot You, You will not forget us--
We feel so sure that You will not forget us--
But stay with us until this dream is past.
And so we ask for courage, strength, and pardon--
Especially, I think, we ask for pardon--
And that You'll stand beside us to the last."
What it comes to is the old truth which we have learnt from Foreign
Missions--the centre must be converted by the circumference; it is
the self-sacrifice of its Mission work abroad which has saved the
Church from "fatty degeneration of the heart" at home; it is the
growing change of mind among the defenders of our country which must
permeate and ennoble the country itself.
Do I look to GOD? But I could only see Him in CHRIST, for He says
Himself--and it is either the greatest blasphemy or the greatest
truth in the world--"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man
cometh unto the FATHER but by Me."
Trafalgar Day, 1915, then, should be not only the turning-point
of the world's history, but the inauguration of a new Britain.
If the war stopped at this moment, should we really be a changed
nation?--would not the old miserable internal disputes break out
again?--might we not again be as we were in July, 1914, on the verge
of civil war in Ireland, of a revolution among women, and of the
greatest industrial strike of modern times? I come back at the end
of so many months of the war to the picture which I tried to hold
up to London in its first week--"Facing the war is drinking the
cup"--"The cup which My FATHER hath given me, shall I not drink it?"
We have to repeat the very words of our LORD Himself.
Have we drunk the cup, and drunk it to its dregs? Only then will the
angels come and strengthen us for victory; we shall deserve victory
then, and we shall be ready for it, for the cup which we shall drink
will be the cup to which the SON of GOD Himself put His lips, and
the courage and fortitude of Gethsemane leads on to the overwhelming
victory of Easter Day.
It is then "Our Day" in an even deeper sense than those mean who so
rightly ask our alms to-day for those splendid sister societies of
St. John and the Red Cross. Of course we shall pour out into their
lap, for the sake of our wounded heroes at the Front, all that we
can; but it is "Our Day" because it is the day when the nation is
tested to the roots of its being. "If thou hadst known, even thou,
in the midst of this thy day, the things which belong unto thy
peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes." They are not hid from
our eyes yet; it is still Our Day; but let it pass, and it has gone
for ever.
VI
THE KNOCKING AT THE DOOR[11]
[11] Preached at St. Mary's, Bryanston Square, at a service for the
Church-workers of the Deanery.
"Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear My voice
and open the door, I will come and sup with him, and he with
Me."--REV. iii. 20.
I will come unto him and sup with him, and he with Me. I think
sometimes that we dwell in our Advent meditation too exclusively
on the thought of the coming Judgment. Of course we have to dwell
on it. "Behold, the Judge standeth before the door." A tremendous
truth that is. "Behold, the Judge standeth before the door." There
is going to come a time when the door will come down with a crash,
and we shall be face to face with the Judge. And this affects
every single period of our lives. We sometimes imagine that we are
going--dare I say the word?--to _dodge_ the Judgment. Not at all;
we are going to look into those Eyes like a Flame of Fire, and every
man will give an account of himself before GOD. And every day is
making up the Judgment. Every thought, every word, every act, every
service, every decision we make, it all goes into the judgment, it
all goes into the verdict. And when the Judge who stands before the
door comes inside, He registers the verdict and the sentence we have
been preparing all our lives. We go to our own place--the place that
we have prepared for ourselves.
Now that is a tremendous thought, and it is one that we cannot
possibly ignore. What is a person, what is a Church-worker, to do
who realises that the Judge standeth before the door? What am I to
do when I realise that He stands before the door of my heart? The
answer can only be: Ask Him in as the SAVIOUR, before He comes as
the Judge that is to be.
I want now to take with you another kind of Advent--may I say a more
delightful kind of Advent?--that is, the Advent of JESUS CHRIST
Himself into the soul. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and
if any man will hear My voice and open the door, I will come in to
him and sup with him, and he with Me." It seems at first sight too
good to be true, when you think who JESUS CHRIST was--the LORD of
Angels, the SON of GOD, the supreme Captain of the heavenly host,
the most perfect beautiful Character that ever lived--that He is
going Himself to come. Think of it--that He is going to come within
me, within you, to live there, to dominate your consciousness,
dominate your mind, your life, so that you will speak with His
words, think with His thoughts, judge with His judgment; that He
will live in you. It seems almost too much to believe; and yet this
is precisely the thing which, when we study the New Testament,
we find is promised, not only in this passage, but in St. John's
Gospel. "My FATHER and I, We will come unto him and make Our abode
with him." St. Paul's favourite motto is: "CHRIST in you the hope
of glory." CHRIST in you, through the HOLY SPIRIT. He, of course,
brings JESUS with Him. It is said in St. John's Gospel: "He is
with you, but He shall be _in_ you." And when I speak to a number
of Confirmation candidates, I believe it is perfectly true to say
before the Confirmation: "He is _with_ you, but He shall be _in_
you." For that is the great gift of Confirmation, the falling of the
HOLY GHOST. "Then laid they their hands on them, and the HOLY GHOST
came upon them, for as yet He had fallen on none of them."
There is no doubt that this tremendous gift is the special promise
given by Christianity. CHRIST wants to live in me. He wants to come
inside. He stands outside the door, but if I ask Him He will come
inside. And notice, secondly, that this tremendous promise is not
made to a few selected people. You might suppose that it was meant
for a few Sisters of Mercy, very devoted, who live their lives
among the poor, or to a few particular saints among the clergy.
But you all have this promise. This tremendous promise comes in
the midst of the message to the Church in Laodicea, the people who
were neither cold nor hot, the people who were uplifted when they
ought to have been humble, the people who had to be chastened and
rebuked that they might be made humble, the people who had not a
chance of overcoming in their own strength--in fact, people just
like you and me. And it is just because we know this, that I have
to give this message of love to you. It is just because we know
that we are neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm--the churchwardens,
workers, sidesmen, Sunday-School teachers--it is just because we are
conscious, and because we know that we do want chastening, that we
may be perfected and purified; in fact, it is just because we are
like the people to whom that message was given that we need to pay
heed to the warning of the message. CHRIST says: "I stand at the
door and knock, and if any of you will open the door and hear My
voice, I will come in and sup with you, and you with Me."
And, therefore, you see, that sets us thinking, does it not? as to
what this knocking at the door can mean. Is it possible, you say,
that CHRIST has been knocking at the door, and I never knew it was
He who was knocking? The whole thing is wonderfully symbolised
at the consecration of a church. Perhaps you have not seen the
consecration of a church. The Bishop, representing JESUS CHRIST,
knocks three times at the door, and says: "Lift up your heads, O
ye gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of
Glory shall come in." The churchwardens and sidesmen say: "Who is
the King of Glory?" And the Bishop outside replies: "The LORD of
Hosts. He is the King of Glory." Then the doors are flung open,
and the Bishop enters, symbolising the entrance of CHRIST into His
Church. That happens every time a new church is consecrated in the
diocese of London or anywhere else. Who is the King of Glory? Who is
He? Is it possible that He has been knocking at my heart and I have
never known?
How does He knock? 1. First of all, and perhaps most commonly, by
what we call _smiting the conscience_. You notice we use the very
words in our popular language which represents knocking--smiting
the conscience. Is it possible, for instance, that even now some
of you have been conscious that you are not what you ought to be,
that your life is not what it ought to be, that there is something
wrong with you? People sometimes come to me and say: "Bishop, I
want to see you. I am not right. There is something not right with
me; something tells me I have not done my work as I ought. There
seems to be something between me and GOD." Well, you must cherish
that smiting of the conscience. Do not ignore it or despise it. It
is the knocking, knocking at the door, of JESUS CHRIST Himself.
There is not a doubt about it. Sometimes He knocks the door very
loudly. Sometimes His knocks are soft, just like taps. When some
pure-hearted boys or girls are going to be confirmed, it is a very
gentle knock that CHRIST makes at the door of their young hearts.
He feels sure they will attend. He does not have to rouse them by
loud thundering knocks. He comes quietly because that heart is made
for JESUS CHRIST, and JESUS CHRIST is made for that heart. And
therefore at a Confirmation of well-prepared candidates it is lovely
to think how He comes up and knocks at the young soul, and the soul
recognises the knock, and says: "Come in." No loud knock is wanted.
We were meant to grow up with "our days bound each to each by
natural piety." CHRIST, who has taken us up in His arms at Baptism,
is made to come gently, quietly, and happily, into the young soul
at Confirmation. There is not meant to be some great break in our
lives. We are meant to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our
LORD and SAVIOUR JESUS CHRIST. But if there comes this knocking,
a smiting of the conscience, I do pray you to remember that it is
meant in love, that it is CHRIST who wants to come within us.
2. Sometimes the knock is a very heavy one, the heavy dull knocking
of a _great sorrow_. I have seen a great deal of it, when people
have lost their dear ones in this Great War. One who had lost the
light of her eyes said to me the other day: "I somehow feel nearer
GOD in spite of it all." No doubt in that heavy, sad knock at the
door you can hear JESUS CHRIST'S own knocking. He may come into the
soul through the sorrow in a way in which He has never come when
all is right and bright and happy. If some of you have heard that
heavy knocking at the door, do not think GOD has forgotten you and
forsaken you. Rise and open the door, and CHRIST will come into your
soul in a way in which He has never come before in all your life.
3. Sometimes it is the quick happy _knocking of joy_. Someone
wrote to me the other day that he had had a great joy. All the
darkness seemed now to have cleared away. He said: "I see my path
in the light of GOD'S love." There was the quick knocking of joy,
and CHRIST came in with the joy. The clearer knock of joy was the
knocking of JESUS CHRIST.
4. Sometimes it is _some friend_ who comes into the life, some
influence, perhaps a parish priest, who knocks at the door. Perhaps
only too unwillingly at first you open the door, and you find that
in the parish priest who comes you have found your best friend on
earth, and he by his coming in brings CHRIST to you; he brings Him
with him, and he leaves Him with you, if he is a faithful steward.
If the parish priest is a faithful steward, he leads you to the
Master. Then, perhaps, the sudden call comes. I have seen this
happen to many young soldiers. I lately spent two months with those
who were just going out--they are now in the trenches. They crowded
in every evening to have a talk or they lay down on the ground and
drank in every word at some Church Parade service. I could see, as
I watched their faces, that they were hearing the call of their
country to risk their lives, their all. It brought them near to
JESUS CHRIST. In the knocking of their country's call JESUS CHRIST
knocked, and I believe there are many fighting in the trenches now
every day borne up by a faith they did not have until this summer--a
belief in the immediate presence of their SAVIOUR with them. It
would not have happened but for this sudden necessity of facing the
ordeal of their lives.
Is it possible that all these things, or some of them, have
been happening to you--or something different that I have not
mentioned--and you have never recognised it as yet as being what
it is, JESUS CHRIST knocking at the door? Now what are you to do?
What are any of us to do, for I am just one among you? It seems
clear there are three things that we are bound to do, if this great
miracle (and it is nothing else) is to take place. The first thing
is to listen for and recognise the voice of JESUS CHRIST outside the
door, that we may be ready and prepared to open the door. And do you
not think that the reason that many of us never hear JESUS CHRIST'S
voice is that we never listen for it, that we have no quiet time,
that we have provided no time for meditation and prayer? We are too
busy. We get up in the morning just in time to start off for our
work; we never have this quiet time, or only a very few moments to
think, in which the voice will be heard.
Now, I cannot tell you how much I believe in what I call _listening
to the voice of God_. We pray, indeed--we all of us pray. But it is
the ten minutes after prayer that matters, it is the ten minutes'
listening to what He is going to say back, and often we do not give
that time at all, and so we never get the answer. Is it not fair
to say that some of you Church-workers just kneel down for a few
hurried moments, and then are up again from your knees, off to
some duty on earth, and that possibly a few minutes each day would
constitute all the time we devote to listening to the voice of GOD?
If that is all, can you wonder when you take your Sunday-School
lesson that it is rather dry, or that your mission sermons do not
seem to have much inspiration about them, and gradually the voice
of JESUS CHRIST fades away and becomes very vague? You do not give
time. Do not tell me that in the twenty-four hours you cannot find
time for the most vital thing in this world. We are only here for a
few passing years. Five minutes after death it matters more than I
can say--these quiet times in our lives, they are worth more than
gold, quiet times when we listen to the voice of GOD. After death
how still it is!
"I hear no more the busy beat of time,
Nor in me feel the fluttering pulse nor faltering breath."
One moment will not be different from the next in the stillness and
quiet of Paradise. And in the quiet of the other world how much we
shall regret having had so few quiet times on earth! Why, one of
the very busiest merchants in the City used to be very regular at
a daily service. I said to him once: "How can you find time, you,
one of the very busiest merchants in the City, to attend daily
service?" He said: "I am so busy I must go to the daily service." He
felt his business would simply sweep him away if he did not get a
quiet time. And Mr. Gladstone, you will remember, kept his Sundays
in unbroken quiet, waiting upon GOD during the very busiest period
of his life. Without it he would have lost the quiet and strength of
his soul. Therefore make your first resolution. "I will listen to
what the LORD GOD will say concerning my soul." "Speak, LORD, for
Thy servant heareth." If you want to have strength and happiness in
your spiritual work, wait upon God. And in the silence you will hear
the voice of JESUS CHRIST; you will hear His knock.
Then, when we have heard the voice and recognised the knock, the
next thing to do is to open the door. How simple that sounds, does
it not? and how difficult it often is! Picture some who have had the
door of their souls closed tightly for years. You have to prise the
door open, and you have to break down the fixed habits of the man
who has never prayed except for a few moments or two in his life;
how hard he finds it to reverse the habits of a lifetime! Someone
who has an old quarrel, through jealousy or something else, with
another worker--how hard it is to forgive and begin all over again!
But it has got to be done, the door has to be prised or forced,
because if CHRIST is to come in we have to open the door--that is
our part in it--and CHRIST _will_ come in. And if only we realised
how eager He is to come in, and what a power He has to change the
heart and control the thoughts and purify the conscience, we should
all want Him to come, and we should not spare any time and trouble
to get the door open.
And when He has come in, notice this wonderful phrase: "I will sup
with him, and he with Me." He does not come in as a transient guest
to stay for a little while, and go away, but He comes on a permanent
visit, to take up His permanent residence. And although we should
not have dared to use the words ourselves, the words "I will sup
with him, and he with Me," describe the most delightful friendship.
Do you desire His presence? How often do you come to Holy Communion,
how carefully do you prepare for the great gift of the presence of
JESUS CHRIST in your soul? Why, I would press this on you, that the
supping with JESUS CHRIST and He with you which takes place in the
Holy Communion is the most glorious moment of your whole day. The
first Christians never thought of spending Sunday without going
first to Holy Communion. It was the special service on the Lord's
Day. It may be that some of you who used to be regular have drifted
away from this way of receiving the presence of CHRIST into the
soul. We know no better way for cherishing the presence of CHRIST in
the soul than being regular at Communion. The humblest communicant
comes away from his Communion with the thought: "CHRIST lives in me;
I live, yet not I, but CHRIST liveth in me."
Will you, then, take from me these three thoughts, Listening,
Opening, and Cherishing the Presence: Devotion, Consecration,
Communion? And if you do, I tell you what will happen to your
deanery. It will gradually become the most Christian fellowship in
London. You will be drawn to one another in a way in which you never
have been before. We want more unity in every deanery, so that the
parishes may take an interest in one another, and that all Church
gatherings may be keen and well attended as by a band of brothers
and sisters.
This service now may be the beginning of a new life for the deanery,
not only of a new fellowship, and of far greater devotion in your
work, and of a joy which you never had before. Christmas in war time
is not going to be a merry Christmas for any of us. But there is no
reason, if we understand what happiness means, why it should not be
a happy one. If these three lessons are taken home, you will as a
deanery and individually and as parishes have a joy which the world
can neither give nor take away.
VII
IMMORTALITY[12]
[12] Preached at the Parish Church, Camden Town.
"JESUS said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he
that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live:
and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die."--ST.
JOHN xi. 25, 26.
"Whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die." If a man
die, shall he live again? There is no time in our history when that
has been a more pressing question than it is to-day. Men are dying
in hundreds. I can think myself of some as dear to me as if they
were my own sons, whose bodies are lying to-day in some Belgian or
French grave. And I spend much of my time in going to comfort the
widows and the mothers. If a man die, shall he live again? I wonder
whether you have ever read or heard read this little poem called
"The Army of the Dead":[13]
[13] By Barry Pain. Published in the _Westminster Gazette_.
"I dreamt that overhead
I saw in twilight grey
The Army of the Dead
Marching upon its way,
So still and passionless,
With faces so serene,
That scarcely could one guess
Such men in war had been.
"No mark of hurt they bore,
Nor smoke, nor bloody stain;
Nor suffered any more
Famine, fatigue, or pain;
Nor any lust of hate
Now lingered in their eyes--
Who have fulfilled their fate,
Have lost all enmities.
"A new and greater pride
So quenched the pride of race
That foes marched side by side
Who once fought face to face.
That ghostly army's plan
Knows but one race, one rod--
All nations there are Man,
And the one King is God.
"No longer on their ears
The bugle's summons falls;
Beyond these tangled spheres
The Archangel's trumpet calls;
And by that trumpet led
Far up the exalted sky,
The Army of the Dead
Goes by, and still goes by.
"Look upward, standing mute;
Salute!"
And will they live again? I think that what chills our faith, and
forms really the only argument that they will not live again, is
the dead appearance of the dead. I am perfectly certain it is that
that chills the faith of hundreds. The dead look so dead. There is
"no voice nor any that answers, nor any that regardeth," and all the
attempts, foolish, often even mischievous, to reach those in the
other world have ended in utter failure. And, therefore, when we
are facing the dead appearance of the dead, we are facing the only
argument there is that they do not live again.
I want to say now one or two things that I hope will help you to
have a happy view of death, to make you absolutely certain that when
a man dies he does live again.
1. And, first of all, remember how _deceptive are appearances in
Nature_. We might be absolutely certain, might we not? if we did
not know to the contrary, that this earth was quite still. It does
not seem to move in the slightest degree, but we really know that
the earth is travelling at the terrific speed of nineteen miles a
second through space--nineteen miles every second. It does look,
does it not? as if the sun was going round the earth quite quickly.
But actually the earth is going round the sun. Again, when you blow
a candle out, it does seem as if you really put it out. But do you?
It is just the one thing you do not do. You do not blow it out. The
force in the flame passes into another form. The conservation of
force or energy is one of the great truths of science. You do not
blow the candle out at all. Therefore even from this lowest ground
there is nothing whatever in science that makes it improbable that
when a man dies he shall live again. But you may go farther, without
leaving what we are taught by scientific knowledge. A man's body
is changed every seven years. Yet the man does not change. I look
back and remember myself perfectly well as a boy who went to a
certain school. And yet not a fragment of my present body went to
that school. There must be someone in me that persists, that goes
on when the body changes. If I were to cut off my hand I should
still be myself; if I were to cut off my arm, my leg, still I should
remain. And so if the whole body goes, I am still myself. If we
had not anything more than this, we could not prove that men live
after death; but there is nothing whatever in the whole teaching of
science to _disprove_ that we do. You might, for instance, notice
that an instrument in a room is perfectly silent, but that may be
because he who has been playing upon it has gone into another room.
There would be no argument in the silence of the instrument for the
non-existence of the player. I say that because one of the most
touching incidents in my life was when a poor little girl said to me
(I have often quoted this): "I feel so afraid of death. I seem to
see it coming down on me like a great shadow." For a moment or two
I prayed for the right word to say to her, and it seemed to come to
me, as it does come at these moments, from the HOLY SPIRIT. I said
to her: "You would not be afraid if I were to come and carry you
into the next room." "No," she said, "I should not." "Well, then,"
I said, "would you be afraid if someone ten thousand times kinder,
and with ten thousand times more strength, should carry you into
another room?" When I next saw her she was dead, with a smile on
her face. If the player has gone away into the next room, no wonder
the instrument does not sound. And therefore, if the body seems
dead, it only seems dead because the owner of the body has gone into
the next room. It is said in the hospital, as the nurse comes out
from behind the screen: "He is gone." He is gone--quite so, he is
gone--therefore no wonder his body looks dead.
2. And this becomes all the more certain when you notice that ever
since man has existed _he has always believed_ and felt perfectly
certain that he is going to survive death. This is one of the great
instincts in humanity. Such convictions always point to some great
truth that corresponds to them. For instance, the prayer instinct
in man demands GOD. It has been beautifully said that, just as
the fin of the fish demands the water, and just as the wing of
the bird demands air, so the instinct of prayer in man demands
GOD. Man is a praying animal. He always has prayed, and that great
instinct of prayer demands satisfaction. He always has believed he
is going to live after death, and the very fact that that instinct
has been planted in him everywhere demands that he shall. There is
a very touching story in ancient literature about the great Greek
philosopher Socrates. Although he knew nothing about CHRIST or the
Christian revelation, he had a long conversation, recorded in one of
the most ancient writers, before he drank the fatal poison, hemlock.
Although he had not the Christian revelation, he gave all the
arguments necessary to make everyone around him certain that five
minutes after death he would be the same as five minutes before.
3. And this becomes all the more certain when you consider the
_character of GOD_. People often do not realise how much the
character of GOD is bound up with this question of immortality. No
good man would implant a living instinct in a child's nature and
then love to tantalise and disappoint it. No good man would do it,
or think for a moment of doing it; and do you suppose GOD would? Let
me read you the first portion of a beautiful letter which I have
received from one of the highest in the land, who lost her husband
last year, and has lost her splendid son this year in battle. She
writes: "Dear and kindest friend, Lord Bishop--I have lingered in
thanking you for your letter, because it was so precious, and is
always beside me to inspire and comfort. England has gone forth
'obedient unto death' in the honour that befits her, and we must try
and be worthy. It does not seem lonely, for they have gone in good
company, that great band of brave, shining knights who have given
all." That beautiful trust inspires the "Farewell of the Dead,"
which was written during the early weeks of the war:
"Mother with unbowed head,
Hear thou across the sea
The farewell of the dead,
The dead who died for thee.
Greet them again with tender words and grave,
For, saving thee, themselves they could not save.
"To keep the house unharmed
Their fathers built so fair,
Deeming endurance armed
Better than brute despair,
They found the secret of the word that saith,
'Service is sweet, for all true life is death.'
"So greet thou well thy dead
Across the homeless sea,
And be thou comforted
Because they died for thee.
Far off they served, but now their deed is done
For evermore their life and thine are one."
Now, do you suppose--this is to me an absolutely irrefragable
argument--do you suppose that GOD would have planted the love of
that son in that mother's heart, and given her that faith, and then
mean to disappoint her? All I can say is that, if He does, He is
no GOD I could love, nor that anyone could love. The world is in
the hand of some foul fiend, who loves to disappoint and blast the
hopes of his children. That is not the GOD of the New Testament. No,
our LORD says something very touching about that. He says: "In My
FATHER'S house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have
told you." "I would have told you." I would not have let you live
all your lives and see your sons die, and your husbands die, and
then disappoint you. "If it were not so, I would have told you."
4. And so we are prepared--you see now why I chose that particular
text--we are prepared for _the great revelation when it comes_. Even
science has prepared us. This great instinct of the soul, that it
will live again, has prepared us. Our belief in a good GOD prepared
us. We were all ready to hear it, and at last it comes from heaven.
"I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in Me, though
he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth
in Me shall never die."
And now we have got it. It has been all led up to; we were all
prepared for it. We could not have been certain till we were told it
by One who came from heaven. This is the Christian religion. It is
no miserable half-and-half Gospel about a good man that once lived.
That view of JESUS CHRIST has nothing to do with Christianity. The
SON of GOD came Himself from heaven.
That is the Christian religion. And, having come from heaven,
He knows what is in heaven. And He speaks with the certainty of
knowledge: "In My FATHER'S house are many mansions. If it were not
so, I would have told you." And "I am the resurrection and the life:
he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die."
And, mark you, to prove it, to get the whole truth this morning, not
only for your own selves, but for the mourners who abound in our
midst, and must abound more and more as the weeks pass--to prove
this doctrine that He rose Himself from the dead, we must have the
full gospel of Easter. Alas! a new theology has been whittling away
the faith of some in this country. But the old doctrine of Easter
was this, "David saw corruption, but He whom GOD raised up saw no
corruption." And as He died and was buried, so He rose again. Why do
we keep Sunday, do you suppose, if there was no Resurrection? Why
not keep as the sacred day Friday, if nothing happened on Sunday? If
CHRIST did not rise on that day, why do we have at our Eucharists
the Body broken and the Blood shed? How could any people enshrine
in their Eucharistic service the tokens of a shameful death unless
the body buried had risen again? How did the Cross get to the top of
the dome of St. Paul's? Why should we have the old gallows erected
over the finest city in the world, unless it was the symbol, not
only of death, but of glorious resurrection?
Therefore, we have not got to put our reason behind our backs in
believing that He who said "I am the resurrection and the life"
raised Himself from the grave. It is with our reason as well as with
our hearts that we say, in answer to the question, "If a man die,
shall he live again?" "Yes, thank GOD, he has never really died."
5. And what sort of life is it going to be on the other side of the
veil, the veil which hides this unseen world? Those young men who
are dying are not always specially religious. They come to church
sometimes, and some come to Communion. I had from the front the
other day an account of how two hundred and fifty of the Artists'
Corps received the Communion before they went into battle. But,
still, we know many of our soldiers are not what we should call
specially religious men. What, therefore, are we to think of the
life awaiting them on the other side of the veil? Well, I will tell
you what I think. I pin my faith to this: JESUS CHRIST knows them
through and through. "JESUS beholding him loved him" was said of
one young man. JESUS beheld all these boys of ours, all these young
comrades, and He loved them. And He knows what kind of life they
will enjoy, and He prepares them for the life that is for them. He
has something for each that they will be fit for, when, strengthened
in character and purified in soul, they are ready to inherit the
kingdom prepared for them. You can trust them with Him, you can
trust your boy to CHRIST, who understands him better than you do.
What shall we have in the other world which will correspond to what
we have here? One thing at least that we shall have is memory.
You remember, in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Abraham says
to Dives: "Son, remember." "Son, remember." Resolve to lay up
something in your life here to which your thoughts will turn happily
and find pleasure in, in the quiet times beyond death. In that
stillness there must be no bitter quarrels to remember, no bitter
jealousies, no unkindnesses. Make to yourselves, while here, friends
from your use of the mammon of unrighteousness, so that when it
fails those friends may receive you into everlasting habitations.
And then with memory will come love, all the old beautiful love and
friendship which makes us so happy here. But, mark you, the right
kind of love--not lust. "Love is the fulfilling of the law," says
St. John.
"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain,
But Lust's effect is tempest after sun;
Love's gentle spring doth always fresh remain,
Lust's winter comes ere summer half be done."[14]
The two are absolutely different. Love thinks of the interests of
the loved one, and is full of self-control and self-restraint. But
lust only thinks of self, and is unbridled and unrestrained. Love
goes on into the other world.
[14] Shakespeare.
"They sin who tell us Love can die;
With life all other passions fly,
All others are but vanity.
In heaven Ambition cannot dwell,
Nor Avarice in the vaults of hell.
Of lust these passions of the earth,
They perish where they have their birth,
But Love is indestructible.
Its holy flame for ever burneth.
From heaven it came, to heaven returneth;
Full oft on earth a troubled guest,
At times deceived, at times oppressed,
In heaven it finds its perfect rest.
It soweth here in toil and care,
But the harvest-time of Love is there."[15]
[15] Southey's "Curse of Kehama."
Therefore cultivate here in your Church life, in your home life,
this wonderful, pure, beautiful thing, this love which will last for
ever. "They sin who tell us Love can die." And, above all, keep that
love pure, absolutely pure and true. Let nothing be substituted for
it which calls itself love, but which is not love. Then with this
love, this unselfish, disinterested love, the prayer instinct goes
on. Do not be afraid of thinking of and praying for your dear boy
in Paradise; pray for him. Do you suppose the mother in Paradise
ceases to pray for her son here? You know that, in the old beautiful
prayers of the Church for her dead, we pray that GOD will give them
eternal rest and peace, and that everlasting light will shine upon
them. That prayer instinct that lies so deep here goes on behind the
veil. They are praying for us there as we are praying for them here.
As St. Augustine says so beautifully, "The Church above loves and
helps its pilgrim brothers."
And, then, one thing more must go on--energy and activity of soul.
Can you imagine a man like the late Archbishop Temple doing nothing
for ever and ever? No. The greatest rest is delightful exercise
of the faculties of the soul. And there must be in that other
world work for those who have been active here below. Such souls
when they are taken from us are being promoted to some work that
they are specially fitted to do by the experience which has long
worked itself into their souls. I think of two cases of Christians
suffering patiently week after week, one for thirteen, the other
for fifteen, years. The beautiful patience being worked into their
character will be wanted in the other world.
Then, again, man is born for a Church. He is born to worship here
in companionship with others. I hope that this church will be every
Sunday morning as full as it is now, that you will more and more
join in the fellowship of the saints, and that you will more and
more learn to love this spiritual home, and to cheer one another on
in your spiritual lives, and so be ready, when the time comes, to
worship in the other world with angels and archangels, and all the
company of heaven. Lift up your heads and the hands that hang down,
all ye mourners! For death is not that miserable, terrible thing
which some people think it is. We are born into the other world as
quietly as we are born into this. And the other life there is full
of happiness, full of love, full of joyous and beautiful activities.
And so, when we are called upon to die, it will only be a gentle
passing from life here to life there, and from the fulness and the
happiness of this life to the still deeper fulness and still greater
happiness of the life of the world to come.
VIII
THE PEACE OF JERUSALEM[16]
[16] Preached in Westminster Abbey at the consecration of Canon
MacInnes as Bishop in Jerusalem.
"O pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love
thee."--Ps. cxxii. 6.
There is no place in the world to be compared to Jerusalem, if you
consider its romantic position, its historical interest, and its
spiritual significance. What a relief it is to breathe its mountain
air after the hot plains of Egypt! On what a glorious position it
stands, more than two thousand feet above the sea, surrounded by
hills even higher than the hill on which it stands itself! Truly,
still "the hills stand about Jerusalem"--a true image of the way the
LORD stands about His people.
But it is not the romantic position of Jerusalem which gives it
its chief claim to fame, but, even more, its marvellous history.
Really, to uncase Jerusalem, to dig down from one Jerusalem to
another, to be able to explain the history which would attach to
each layer of it, would be to unravel the history of the ancient
world. Volumes have been written, and will continue to be written,
on this entrancing theme; but suffice it to say that the man who
stands, say, at the centre of the Temple site of Jerusalem is
standing on one of the most historic spots in the world.
But, after all, when one is speaking in a Christian church at the
consecration of a Christian Bishop, it is neither of these things
which makes Jerusalem absolutely unique. The Seven Hills of Rome and
its Forum might compete with Jerusalem from the point of view of
geography or history. No! it is the supreme fact that here, and here
alone, on the world's surface, in Judæa and Galilee, the feet of the
SON of GOD actually trod the earth, which makes Jerusalem unique.
Rightly has Palestine been called ever since the Holy Land. When the
guardian of the traditional site of the Ascension points out to you
the spot which the feet of the LORD last trod before He ascended
behind the cloud, of course you know that such tradition is too
detailed to be necessarily accurate with regard to the actual spot;
but that His feet _did_ tread the earth about that spot, that He
_did_ walk over the Mount of Olives, that He _did_ agonise somewhere
near those trees in the Garden of Gethsemane, that on one or other
of those skull-shaped mounds He _did_ die for the sins of the whole
world, that either at the traditional site or somewhere near He
_did_ rise again from the dead--this it is that makes Jerusalem
the joy of the whole earth. With ten times the depth of meaning
with which even the ancient Jews could say it, the Christian will
say: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her
cunning; yea, if I prefer not Jerusalem in my mirth." "O pray for
the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love thee."
I. The consecration, then, of a Bishop of the great Anglo-Catholic
Church, who is to live in Jerusalem, is an event which concerns
the whole of Christendom, and especially every branch of the
Anglo-Catholic Church throughout the world; for it is clear that
such a Bishop in Jerusalem has three great and important functions
to discharge to the whole Christian world:
1. In the first place, he has to represent worthily, by personal
conduct and by reverent and dignified ceremonial, the great branch
of the Catholic Church to which he belongs. All branches of the
Church meet at Jerusalem; several have their altars by the Holy
Sepulchre. How can the other branches of the great Catholic Church
learn what is the teaching and the practice of the Anglican branch
except from the Bishop who represents her there, and from the
cathedral over which he presides? If the Bishop himself has no
dignity, no influence, no σεμνότης, among all those dignified and
grey-bearded Patriarchs who represent other Churches, the Church of
England will suffer in the opinion of the whole Christian Church. If
the cathedral church is poor in worship, feeble in life, unspiritual
in tone, the Church of England loses caste among the Churches of the
world. If, on the other hand, the Bishop and his cathedral worthily
maintain the best traditions of the ancient and apostolic Catholic
Church of England, then will the representatives of other ancient
Churches gladly acknowledge that "the LORD is with her of a truth."
2. But not only has the Bishop in Jerusalem to be a worthy witness
to the doctrine of his Church, and in his cathedral to display a
winning example of its ceremonial and worship, but he also has to
respect and foster the spiritual life in the ancient Churches of the
East. He is to be no proselytiser, seeking to take away members of
other Churches to form his Church; he is rather the kindly brother,
ever ready to lend a hand to fan the embers of spiritual life in
other Churches, or to rejoice in the fervent glow on other altars
besides his own. No Bishop would be a fit Bishop in Jerusalem who
had not some knowledge of the history of the ancient Churches of
Christendom, an interest in their varying liturgies, and a deep
respect for their history and the special significance each has in
the life of the Catholic Church. On the other hand, that Bishop
would have a peculiar glory in his episcopate who most succeeded by
brotherly sympathy and inspiring example in stimulating life in an
ancient Church, where, perhaps, life was running low, or was able
to send up the sap once again through the fibres of an apparently
withered tree.
3. But his efforts must not stop there. The Bishop in Jerusalem
must be a missionary. If from the first the Gospel was to spread
throughout the world, "beginning at Jerusalem," Jerusalem must never
cease to be a missionary centre. There must be no faithless despair
as to the eventual conversion both of Jews and of Mohammedans; the
great heathen tribes of the Shellooks and the Dinkas of the Upper
Nile, up to which the diocese, with its centre at Jerusalem, at
present extends, even though it must be exercised for the most part
through the presence of an assistant Bishop in Khartoum, must feel
the missionary zeal of the Bishop in Jerusalem. Every missionary
agency within thousands of miles must be certain of his fatherly
interest. I have visited myself nearly every mission station from
El Obeid, five hundred miles beyond Khartoum, to Beyrout, and seen
how greatly was appreciated the genuine interest of even a passing
Bishop; but those mission stations must feel sure of the interest of
the Bishop whose "sedes" is at Jerusalem, and above all, of course,
those must feel sure of it whose missions are connected with our own
Church. Few people can have visited the magnificent mission hospital
of the London Jews' Society in Jerusalem, which is said to be the
finest mission hospital in the world, or seen the devoted work of
the representatives of the Church Missionary Society in Cairo, or
watched the mission schools of the Hosanna League on the Lebanon,
without being proud of the missionary zeal and spiritual efforts of
our own Church.
II. But on a day like this we are at liberty to see visions and
to dream dreams, and one can imagine missionary efforts which
have their centre at Jerusalem on a far more extensive scale than
any which have been possible as yet--missionary efforts which may
include the revival of the ancient Churches of Asia Minor, the
linking up with the work done by the Archbishop's Mission to the
Assyrian Church, and a far more complete subjugation to CHRIST of
the Lebanon district, to which Canon Parfit's and Canon Campbell's
schools seem to point the way.
Such, then, seem to be the possibilities and prospects of a Bishop
in Jerusalem, and we are encouraged to raise our hopes high to-day,
first by the wonderful blessing which has been granted to the work
of him who is laying down the pastoral staff, wielded with so much
tact and love and winning influence by Bishop Blyth for a quarter
of a century; and, secondly, by the experience and attainments and
standing of him who this day takes up the pastoral staff which
Bishop Blyth lays down.
1. And first with regard to Bishop Blyth himself. It was said
to me in Jerusalem of the Bishop, by one who has long been the
superintendent of the Church missionary work in Palestine: "He
has laid a splendid foundation on which a success can be built."
Few can realise, who have not been at Jerusalem, the dignity and
beauty of St. George's Cathedral, which Bishop Blyth has built,
and the charm of the daily services in it, morning and evening, at
which the choir consists of the delightful Syrian boys and girls
who form the schools. I have never seen boys more like English
boys in their keenness for games (they were quite invincible at
football) and their general manliness of tone, and under the gentle
tutelage of English ladies the Syrian girls are being trained to
be well-mannered, and capable teachers, whom I frequently found
teaching either in Palestine, on the Lebanon, or in the schools of
Egypt and the Soudan. But, in order to understand the influence
accumulated by Bishop Blyth during these long years of residence
in Jerusalem, you had to visit with him the Patriarchs of other
branches of the Church; everywhere you found him trusted and loved;
to come with his introduction was to be welcomed by all the ancient
Churches of the East, and it is certain that, just as it was said
of Livingstone that "he left the door open in Africa for all the
white men who should come after," so it is certainly true that
Bishop Blyth has left behind him, among all the representatives
of the ancient Churches of the East, open hearts into which his
successor can enter. And we are glad to think that we still have the
Bishop resident with us here in London, to give us his counsel and
advice.[17]
[17] The Bishop only lived a few weeks after his successor's
consecration.
2. And then, with regard to his successor, he is no tyro going out
to learn his work for the first time; he is already one of the
best-known missionaries in the whole of the nearer East; he has
for years been the superintendent of the Church missionary work in
Egypt and the Soudan; he has had the control of many workers, and
has had, moreover, thousands of pounds passing annually through his
hands. He is a good Arabic scholar, and can not only take services,
but can speak and preach freely in Arabic, and what that means in
the East every traveller knows. His long experience of dealing with
the Coptic Church in Egypt, and the great respect in which he and
his colleague, Mr. Gairdner, are held in it, are a certain guarantee
of the respect and loving reverence with which he will treat the
other ancient Churches of the East; and he has himself assured us,
in words which have been printed and circulated, that, so far from
wishing in any way to alter the simple and beautiful service in St.
George's Cathedral, he will love to fan and foster the flame of
devotion which will always burn, it is hoped, more and more brightly
at the central shrine of the Anglo-Catholic Church in this city of
Jerusalem, which is itself the cradle of the Christian Church.
It is therefore, dear brother, with very high hopes and many earnest
prayers we send you forth to-day. The horizon is clouded at present
with the heavy clouds of war; CHRIST'S work will be crippled for a
time, and further extension for a time will be impossible; but when
the great clouds of war have, in the mercy of GOD, rolled away, and
the Sun of Righteousness has arisen with healing in His wings, and
Christianity has been proved to be more than ever essential to the
prosperity and well-being of the world, then we believe that _you_
are singularly fitted in the providence of GOD to avail yourself of
the mighty opportunity which will open out.
"O pray for the peace of Jerusalem; they shall prosper that love
thee." There will be many who will pray for its peace from to-day
more fervently than ever, and they will uphold your hands as they
pray it, as Aaron and Hur held up the hands of Moses; and if, as we
believe from the bottom of our souls, GOD will hear that prayer,
then Jerusalem shall once again be built as a city at unity with
itself, and from the farthest bounds of the earth there shall come,
at least in spirit, "turning their faces thitherward," more and
more every year, the converted, thankful and adoring "tribes of the
LORD."
II
TO THE CLERGY
I
MESSENGERS[18]
[18] Given first at Chiswick Parish Church to the Clergy of the
Rural Deanery of Hammersmith; afterwards to the Chaplains of the
Fleet, 1916.
The Eyes of Flame[19] are resting upon us; we do not want to get
away for a moment from that thought as our central message. But get
away from the idea that "the Bishop is asking us to come for a Quiet
Day." As I believe events have proved, it is JESUS CHRIST Himself
going round the diocese in the power of the SPIRIT. Wonderful things
have happened on these Quiet Days. Men have been so struck to the
heart that they have resigned their livings; they have seen what
they ought to have been, and with the aid of the HOLY SPIRIT, before
the Eyes of Flame, have contrasted that with what they are. If it
is JESUS CHRIST coming round, then we cannot be too quiet on such
a Day in listening to His voice all the time. It is therefore with
the Eyes of Flame resting upon us and with the prayer "Speak, LORD,
for Thy servant heareth," "I will hearken what the LORD GOD will say
concerning me," that we will think over three things that we are
expected to be. And the first is a _Messenger_. You will remember
that, when we first stood before the Bishop for ordination, we were
told of a great treasure that was committed to our care. We have
spent much time thinking over that treasure.[20] We were reminded
that we were to be messengers, watchmen, stewards. Now we will
simply take the title "messengers."
[19] See a former volume, "The Eyes of Flame" (Wells Gardner, Darton
and Co., Ltd.).
[20] See "The Church in Time of War," pp. 51-70: "The Treasure
Committed to our Trust."
Let us picture the messenger; let us forget the tame surroundings
and monotonous features of the life we lead, and picture ourselves
as real living messengers. We might take one of our despatch-riders.
Few things are more really splendid than the way the undergraduates
of Oxford and Cambridge are doing most of the despatch-riding at the
front--our own boys, we may say, have been carrying the despatches
during this campaign. It is very dangerous work. One of the boys
whom I have known all his life is now a despatch-rider in the war,
having to take these messages at any cost. Everything depends upon
the despatch getting there. The whole brigade will be cut to pieces
if the despatch is not sent there. They only send despatches for the
most urgent reasons. There the despatch-riders are in the darkness,
threading their way through all the great holes made by the shells,
pushing on to take the despatches. They are messengers with a
vengeance, taking their lives in their hands, realising the vital
importance of getting their message through.
Now, I am going to take a particular messenger because his character
and life are very carefully described to us in detail by one of our
great poets. I think it will come home to us more if I can describe
the picture of the messenger of Athens given us by Browning in that
wonderful poem "Pheidippides." It may be more familiar to some than
it is to others. I will just sketch Browning's picture. Pheidippides
tells how he started on a mission of absolutely vital importance,
and the whole problem was to get to Sparta in time to get help. He
dashes off, and stands before the Spartan Senate.
"Persia has come!
Persia bids Athens proffer slaves'-tribute, water and earth;
Razed to the ground is Eretria; but Athens, shall Athens sink,
Drop into dust and die--the flower of Hellas utterly die,
Die with the wide world spitting at Sparta, the stupid,
the stander-by?"
It is a matter of absolute life and death, and that is the first
thing about the messenger I want you to notice. Either he got there
or he did not; either he persuaded them or he did not. He gave his
message, though he did not succeed in persuading Sparta to undertake
the needed help. The fate of his country depended entirely upon his
effort. There is something glorious in his absolute devotion to his
country. Then, when he had given his message, he waited for the
answer, and he is described as quivering with eagerness:
"The limbs of me fretting as fire frets, an inch from dry wood."
That expresses the keenness with which he waited for the answer. And
the answer, which, as you remember, was an evasive one, counselling
delay, is thus characterised by Pheidippides:
"Athens, except for that sparkle--thy name, I had mouldered to ash."
Then, having done everything he could, he dashed back to tell them
at Athens that Sparta was not coming. We see the utter abandonment
of the messenger:
"Not one word to waste, one look to lose on the false and the vile!
Yet 'O Gods of my land!' I cried, as each hillock and plain,
Wood and stream, I knew, I named, rushing past them again."
Then comes the moment of his life. In the midst of the hurry and
race he suddenly comes face to face with his god--the great god
Pan. In all his hurry and haste and keenness he hushes himself in
a moment, to listen to what the god has to say. Very touchingly
described that is. Then, when he has received the message for
himself, for his nation, once again he is off.
"I ran no longer, but flew."
And he stands before his people, and he gives them the full message
which the god had given him, with all its warning and all its
comfort and hope and good news. When that is done he fights on the
Marathon day. And then, when the victory is won, he thinks of what
the god has promised him, and he thinks to
"Marry a certain maid, I know keeps faith to the brave,"
and live with her for the rest of his life.
"Unforeseeing one! Yes, he fought on the Marathon day:
So, when Persia was dust, all cried: 'To Acropolis!
Run, Pheidippides, one race more!'"
Take the news to Athens! He takes it, and his great heart bursts
with the joy of the news.
"Pheidippides dies in the shout for his meed."
He sealed his message with his death.
Now, there is the messenger, and we have to think over the different
points about that messenger, to compare our motives to-day with
what they are expected to be. (1) Take first of all his realisation
that his message was _a matter of life or death_. I wonder whether
some of us are slipping away from that--slipping away from the
awe of that first sermon, slipping into little moral essays or
interminably long discourses? Are we still men with a message?
One of the tremendous revelations in London, after twenty-six years
of life and work there, is the death-struggle that is going on
in every human soul. And even now, as Bishop, I find that every
available five minutes is taken up by the needs and struggles of
some individual soul in the diocese of London. In your parishes it
must be just the same. Upon that message you are going to give on
Sunday morning or evening depends perhaps the salvation, or perhaps
the condemnation, of some soul.
And if we once get into the way of preaching simply interesting
lectures--interesting to ourselves--which we have thought out in our
studies during the week, we have lost the sense of having a message.
One of the most distinguished men then in the Church said to a
young preacher sadly: "You seem to preach as if you have something
to say, and I only preach because I _must_ say something." Well, if
we are drifting into getting up into the pulpit because we must say
something, without realising the temptations and struggles of the
souls in front of us, we have lost our message; we are no longer
messengers.
(2) And then, secondly, what about the old keenness? Am I able to
say "the old keenness"? One honest brother came to me one Quiet Day
and said: "I have never felt keen at all." He could not speak of the
old keenness; he had never had it. He wanted it. The keen messenger
stands quivering like Pheidippides:
"Except for that sparkle, thy name, I had mouldered to ash!"
There stands the true messenger quivering with the keenness of his
message. What has happened to us if we are no longer keen about our
message?
(_a_) Is it because we have really ceased to believe it? I say that
because during this past year I have had some who have openly said
(the realisation of it has come to them during the day) that they
have largely slipped away from their real belief in JESUS CHRIST
as the SON of GOD. They started reading Higher Criticism or German
theology. Of course, we must read very varied kinds of books; we
have no right to be afraid of reading anything that will enable us
to help the laity in their difficulties. But these brothers had
been reading too many of these books speaking of our LORD as only
a man, in which we are told that "He was mistaken in supposing
this," or, "No doubt He was under the impression that this was
the case"; and they have slipped away from their belief in JESUS
CHRIST as the SON of GOD. Their faith has really for a time gone;
they have not got a message, because they do not believe in the old
message. They would have said of such a meditation as we have had
together on the Book of Revelation: "How do we know St. John ever
wrote it?" And if we meditated upon our LORD'S last prayer in St.
John's Gospel, they would say: "How do we know that we have the
words of the LORD'S last prayer?" Thus their minds are really in
doubt all the time, so that at last nothing really speaks to them
at all. Now, what I advise is a careful study of the writings of
such a man as Dr. Swete. He tells us that in that last prayer of our
LORD we have, through the medium of St. John or the writer of St.
John's Gospel--he believes it was St. John--as nearly as you can get
them, the actual words of our LORD'S prayer. I am not taking any
particular case, but only trying to illustrate a state of mind. If
you are losing your message because you are ceasing to believe it,
then all the salt has gone out of your ministry till faith comes
back. If you face it, and find it is so, ask our LORD, who has come
to speak to us now, to restore to you your belief in Him once again,
so that He shall be to you the centre of the universe, and you will
be really in a position to say again, as you once did,
"How sweet the Name of JESUS sounds
In a believer's ear!"
Then you will be able to preach again.
(_b_) Or is it that the fault is not so much intellectual as moral,
and there is really something between you and CHRIST--something
which is making your message appear unreal, because there is
something in your life which contradicts your message? It has been
a very blessed thing that a number of men have seen what that thing
is during these Quiet Days. Is there anything in your life which
contradicts your message? I remember hearing--it was not in this
diocese--of a priest who did not dare to speak to his young men and
boys about certain things, because his own conscience reproached
him. That is the sort of thing that makes your message sound hollow
when you get up to deliver it, in the pulpit or in the Bible-class.
"Search me, O LORD, and seek the ground of my heart, prove me and
examine my thoughts and see whether there be any way of wickedness
in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." This must be our prayer.
If we say that to our people, we must say it to ourselves, and get
it put right, though it may be like plucking out the right eye or
cutting off the right hand. When it is put right your message will
ring true again.
(_c_) Or is it what you may call "middle-aged low spirits"? Is it
something like accidie. Dr. Paget describes that dreariness of
feeling that comes over some in middle age. "You cannot expect that
amount of keenness from me at my age," a man says. I think of three
men myself--Bishop Wilkinson, Bishop King and Canon Body--who were
to the last day of their lives as keen as when they started. So when
you think of these three men, it cannot be middle age or old age
that really produce this accidie. I dare say it would be equally
true of Mr. Simeon or Mr. Wesley, but I only happen to know of
these three men, who were like fathers to me. They were as keen up
to the day that they died as ever they were in their lives. Bishop
Wilkinson's last words before he died--an address to a committee of
his Prayer Union in his diocese--were the same burning words that
had fired the rich people of Eaton Square and the miners of the
North.
Well, if it is not middle age or old age, must be ourselves who are
to blame. Therefore let us ask for a revival of our keenness, and
not put down the want of it to old age or middle age. Of course, it
may be that a man--I want to be quite frank about that--a man has
been too long where he is. If you knew how much prayer and thought
I personally give to this matter, how anxious I am to move men
when I see a move would be for their good, you would realise how
distressing it is to me to keep a man in one place when he would be
much better moved, or promoted to a living. But the simple fact is
there are not enough livings to go round. I want you to realise how
urgently we at the centre feel the danger of men getting stale or
being kept in one place too long. But it is not from the man's point
of view that we ought to look at it. He may pray to have a change.
But while he is there he is the messenger to the people, who are
constantly changing. There is a new population constantly coming in.
He must be there ready for them. And those who remain in the parish
are still depending upon him. He is their messenger; he must not
let them suffer because he is tired of his particular post. I cannot
imagine any of those three men, whom I knew so well, in the least
letting the keenness of their message be diminished because they
thought they ought to be moved somewhere else. A man may feel very
sad because he cannot do more, but he must not let his work fall
off, although he may be praying that in GOD'S providence he may have
a change.
(3) Then comes the waiting before GOD for the message. Pheidippides
bowed his head even in the heat of the race, bowed his head and
listened. And, you know, one of the things we have certainly found
out lately is that the great fault of the Church of England is not
listening. We pray, but we do not wait for an answer. It is the ten
minutes after prayer that matters. It is listening for the answer to
come back. One of the reasons why English clergy need a Quiet Day is
that they are not good listeners to GOD. We talk to Him, we even,
as someone has said, chatter to Him like little children chatter to
their parents, but we do not listen for the reply. We must listen
for the reply when we speak to God. We must wait for our message.
It must be renewed every day. What is the message that I am to take
to the people? Rearrange all your time so that you may have time
for listening. That has been crowded out. It is not a question of
how many visits you can make in a day, but of the atmosphere you
take with you on those visits, and the atmosphere depends upon the
previous "waiting upon GOD." Then when you go on your visit the HOLY
SPIRIT opens the door of the heart of those to whom you go.
(4) Then notice, fourthly, the abandonment of the messenger. I am
sure St. Paul really loved the picture of the runner. Do you notice
he is always going back to it? The runner flung aside his cloak,
with his eyes fixed on the goal, like Pheidippides the messenger;
that is exactly what he did: he flung everything away for speed
and alertness, in order to be there in time--the one thing that
mattered. Do you not think that it may be true that we have become
too comfortable as messengers? May it not be that we have lost the
alertness and keenness and the mobility of the messenger? We have
just settled down into our comfortable homes and creature comforts.
They hinder our movements, and we do not run with the alertness of a
messenger of GOD. Of course, we have to be part of a great system,
to have parishes, to settle down in a certain place, and to secure
that no one is neglected in the parish. But we must remember, we
clergy of the Church of England, that we are not working for a
particular parish or country only, but for the whole world. We must
not rest content in being a stolid yeomanry, who can only fight
in our own country, but we are to be a mobile alert force for the
conversion of the world. We ought to be entirely and absolutely
independent of our comfortable homes, of our comfortable way of
life. It is good to go into camp and be content to stay there for
a couple of months. We ought to feel that having food and raiment,
with these we shall have enough. That love of comfort is a great
danger; it greatly hampers us in our task and in our alertness as
messengers.
And, again, if we are a mobile army for the world, we ought to be
ready to go to any part of the world to which the SPIRIT of the LORD
directs us. It often happens that the SPIRIT catches away some young
curate, and he is found in some unpronounceable place in Japan or
China. He is there because the SPIRIT has taken him there. Therefore
we have to question ourselves very strictly to-day, it seems to me,
as to whether we are detached enough to be messengers, or whether
we have got clogged by mere custom and the comforts of life, so
that we do not move quickly enough. Or again, we may be hampered
in our movements by the demand for a full Catholic service for our
own solace and comfort. Those men at the front who are receiving
the Holy Communion before the battle have little barns for their
service, with flickering and guttering candles. When they come home
they will tell us they have never had such a Communion service
in their lives as those they had with their comrades. Honestly I
consider it is right to have, if we can, a beautiful service which
uplifts our souls, to give our people all the Catholic privileges
possible. But we ought not to be dependent upon it; we ought to
recognise that the heart of the thing is also in the poor barn and
the guttering candle. We all ought to be content to do without many
things that we have now, if only we may be allowed to carry our
message to the ends of the earth.
(5) And then, when he comes, he is to give the full message.
Pheidippides stood before his people and gave it all, the warning,
and the comfort and the inspiration. Do not leave anything out. One
part is as important as another. He gave the whole rounded message,
and we must be careful to do the same. We must be careful not to let
the Gospel consist of one doctrine only--for example, the Atonement.
The Atonement is a part of the Gospel--a glorious part of it--but
it is not the whole message by any means. There is the Gospel of
Grace. We are saved by the death of CHRIST, but we are saved by
Grace and the means of Grace--the power in the water of life to
refresh the soul that is pardoned, and the beautiful sacramental
teaching handed on to us. The prodigal comes back, and he receives
the robe and the ring, and the home, and the feast, and the shoes
for service--all these things. The prodigal of to-day wants them
too; the FATHER'S kiss--the outward and visible sign of the FATHER'S
love; the ring in Confirmation, the robe in Baptism, the home in the
Church, the feast--the Holy Communion--the shoes for service. You
have got to tell them about everything. You have no right to say of
one doctrine: "This is the whole Gospel." We must teach the Gospel
of the Resurrection and the Ascension as much as the Atonement, and
the Church's Sacraments as well. Therefore we have to ask--have
we not?--whether our teaching has degenerated into some little
shibboleth, which we keep repeating over and over again. We must be
messengers of the whole message, and we must see that we are giving
the message in its fulness, or else there may be souls unsaved who
might be saved by the very part of it which we leave out. We might
be astonished if we catechised our people as to what we have really
taught them in ten years. Have we simply given them a series of
moral exhortations, or the same part of the message, year after
year, and not the whole message?
(6) Then, lastly, we must seal the message with our lives. "Do you
really mean to say"--I believe it was a girl who asked the question
when present for the first time at an Ordination Service--"do you
mean to say that every clergyman I have ever met has been through
that?" Well, apparently we do not always give the impression that
we have. The messenger has to seal the message by his life, and by
conduct consistent with such a trust, but also he has got to seal
it, if necessary, with his death.[21] Pheidippides died
"In the shout for his meed."
There ought to be no hesitation about going to infectious cases if
we are called to do so. I am always quoting what Bishop King told us
in one of his pastoral lectures. He was warning us against being
nervous or having presentiments. He said: "I had a presentiment that
I should die when I was twenty-six. And, sure enough, after I was
ordained, the smallpox came to the parish where I was working. I had
to go to the patients, and I had to sit up with them, and bury one
myself. 'Here,' I thought, 'is my presentiment coming true; I am
twenty-six.' But," he said to us in the lecture-hall, "I am here,
gentlemen, this morning." Therefore we should make it a rule that
what little risk there is in our profession we should take, after
seeing to all needful precautions. And if it be so that we die in
the course of our duty through some epidemic, we shall die at our
posts, and be doing what a messenger ought to do.
[21] In giving the substance of this address at a Quiet Day for
the chaplains of the Grand Fleet this summer, I felt the touching
appropriateness of this illustration, as no less than sixteen naval
chaplains had lost their lives during the war.
"'Well,' cried he, 'Emperor, by GOD'S grace
We've got you Ratisbon!
The marshal's in the market-place,
And you'll be there anon
To see your flag-bird flap his vans
Where I, to heart's desire,
Perched him!' The Chief's eye flashed, his plans
Soared up again like fire.
"The Chief's eye flashed; but presently
Softened itself, as sheathes
A film the mother-eagle's eye
When her bruised eaglet breathes:
'You're wounded!' 'Nay,' his soldier's pride
Touched to the quick, he said:
'I'm killed, Sire!' And, his Chief beside,
Smiling, the boy fell dead."
That was a young soldier, a messenger, who came to tell Napoleon of
the success of his arms. It is called simply "An Incident of the
French Camp."[22]
"Smiling the boy fell dead."
Dear brothers, if we are called to seal our message with our lives,
may GOD give us grace to do so!
[22] Robert Browning.
II
PHYSICIANS
We have thought over, or tried to think over, our rôle as
messengers. Now--by that sort of rapid change which these titles
put before us, and this illustrates the extraordinary variety and
interest of our work--we have got to picture ourselves in the sober
mien of physicians--physicians in a ward, good physicians, celestial
surgeons. We must put away the picture of the rapid, eager, loyal
messenger, and remember that there is a side to our message quite
different from this, without which our service as messenger might
degenerate into mere preaching. We have much else to do besides
that. We are house-surgeons, physicians in a great ward of patients,
and that ward is our parish; and upon our training, patience, and
skill, will depend the safety and welfare of all this multitude of
patients. They are all entrusted to our care. But what should we
think, for instance, of a surgeon out at the front, if, with a great
mass of wounded to be attended to, nobody ever asked him to come,
but left him in a tent without a call? It would not be a very strong
testimonial to his skill or standing or people's belief in him. And,
therefore, we have to ask ourselves this fresh home question: If in
our ward we are not called in, may it not be that the people do not
believe in us, or trust us, or think we are sufficiently trained to
be able to help them?
(1) And that brings us, of course, to the whole question of training
for the ministry. It is really humiliating when you think of it.
No one is allowed to be a physician or surgeon, not even to begin
as one--certainly not to have any sort of responsibility--unless
he has had at least five years' course of continuous training. And
sometimes we think a year or two at a University or a Theological
College, not necessarily both, quite enough training to become
surgeons and physicians of the soul. I do think the Church ought to
back up the Bishops in the efforts they are making to remedy this
great contrast. Five years' incessant training for those who treat
the body, and a hasty two years considered sufficient for the more
difficult task of surgeon and physician of the soul!
Therefore do back us up in our difficult task of trying to get a
better-trained ministry. If the parish priest only theoretically
believes in it, and is quite upset if his curate is ploughed in
the examination, and writes and begs that he at least may be let
through--I am only giving an illustration of dozens of letters I
have received--that sort of thing does not help us. It is no good
my speaking to you anything but true words; that sort of thing does
not help us to keep up what should be the standard of our trained
ministry. We must remember that the real examination comes in our
parish. When we arrive there, it is the people who really examine
us, and if, when they have got to know us, they find that we are
not worth calling in to minister to their souls--well, it is not
the fault of the people, it is the fault of the training and the
want of skill of the physician. And if some were ordained quickly
owing to poverty--and GOD knows it often is owing to poverty: many
a man would be only too thankful for another year in a theological
college--that is the fault of the Church. The Church must supply
the money if the men cannot. We have an efficient Board, in the
diocese to-day, of responsible men choosing out candidates. And if
the Church were a little more generous in its support, we might have
a really adequate supply of clergy. We have not got by any means
the full number which the Church needs to-day to send all over the
country.
(2) The second essential thing is self-knowledge. "Physician, heal
thyself," is an old saying. Of course, I am not speaking from a
pedestal, but simply sitting among you, and speaking to myself as
much as to you. The words I believe CHRIST is saying to us all are,
"Physician, heal thyself"--that is to say, we must see what is wrong
in our own lives and works; otherwise we cannot have the insight
to heal others. We do not know how to do it, unless we have cut
down into our own souls. The man who has done that is the man who
really knows. It is only the man who is frank enough to look below
the surface and see the wickedness of his own heart who is the one
who can deal with other people. The HOLY SPIRIT, who alone knows us
through and through, may bring us to a deeper self-knowledge to-day,
which will make us very much better physicians. If we heal ourselves
first, we shall know how to heal others.
(3) Then, thirdly, to carry out this great task we must know our
people one by one. Here is a great difficulty. A parish priest may
have ten thousand people in his charge, but how difficult it is
for him to know each one! He must do it--though, of course, partly
through others. He must have a system. I do not think a parish
priest ought ever to be wholly inaccessible to any part of his
parish. He must have his curates working for him, but the priests
who work with him must have a system by which the vicar himself will
know when he is wanted. I am sure every parish priest feels that
he must be ready for any emergency. It is not easy to escape from
councils and committees, but he should be ready with the surgeon's
knife whenever he is wanted all over his great ward. He must not
leave it wholly to anyone else, so long as he is responsible. In
order to know the people, he must be up to the last day of his
life a visitor. I hold it to be an absolutely wrong view of the
pastoral office to say: "I can sit in my cassock in the church, and
the people know where I am, and they can come to me if they like."
Of course, it is a very good thing to have times when we shall be
in church, and when the people will know that we are there. There
is (let us say) the daily service at a time which everybody knows;
they can catch us after the daily service, and see us as we go away.
We make it known we shall be pleased to see them after Mattins and
Evensong. And we have a time before the great festivals when they
can come to prepare themselves for the great services. All that
is wholly to the good. It is good for the house-surgeon to have a
place where his patients can come and see him. But something else is
wanted. He must be ready to go out and see them when they are ill,
and find out what is the matter with them. What should we think of a
physician who had always the same regimen and the same medicine for
everybody? It used to be a joke, I remember, at a great school at
which I was, that the doctor gave us all the same physic. It was no
doubt a libel on him. But certainly such a method would be a fault
in the case of the spiritual surgeon; souls would die under such
treatment. We have to ask ourselves: Are there any patients dying
under my hand, in my ward, because I have not taken the trouble to
really heal them, because I am not going down deep enough, because
I am not finding out what is the matter with them, because I am not
really acting the part of physician, still less that of a celestial
surgeon?
(4) And then, when we have got the people to trust us so that they
wish us to go to them, or they come to us with their troubles and
difficulties and sorrows, we must have for our people the patience
of the good physician. If we have known and benefited by the
patience of our own physicians of the body when we have been ill,
and have realised how patient they are, if some of our best friends
have been the doctors, the physicians, and surgeons, who have
attended to us, we, too, have got to show the patience of the good
physician to our people. We have no right to give a sarcastic answer
because a particular parishioner seems to be beyond the limit. We
must imitate the patience of JESUS CHRIST. The old story of "Quo
Vadis?" is told in different ways. One version is that, as St.
Peter was, in a fit of impatience, leaving Rome, our LORD met him
on the way, and he, Peter, asked Him whither He was going. The LORD
answered that He was going to Rome to be crucified again because
Peter had left his post. Another version of the same story is that
one of the disciples was asked where he was going, and he said: "I
have lost patience with such and such a man." The LORD said: "I have
had patience with that man for forty years." Whichever way you put
the story, the point is that we have no right to be impatient with
our people. Why _should_ we be impatient? Think how patient He has
been with us all this time. We must have, then, the patience of the
Good Physician. Let me speak to the younger clergy, nearly all of
whom I have ordained myself. Do you remember that when you were
undergraduates you were not particularly keen when someone came in
to speak to you for your good? Perhaps you were a little impatient.
And, perhaps, after all is said and done, the young men of the
parish feel very much the same when you come in and want to talk to
them for their good. I think sometimes we forget that the young men
of the parish are very much the same as we were as undergraduates,
and that if they do not come on at once to the Bible-class or want
to be confirmed, they are not very much worse than we were at their
age. Therefore we must pray for more patience with them. Someone had
patience with us, or we could not have been here in the ministry at
all. Someone bore with all our waywardness, and with hopefulness
brought us on to something better. We shall never do anything
without patience. It is the patience of CHRIST that will win them at
last, and they will say: "Thy gentleness has made me great."
(5) But, then, while we are patient, we must not be afraid of
speaking the uncomfortable truth. I mean, there is such a thing as
being too kind--too kind in the sense that we are afraid to speak
out, to cut down, as it were, with the surgeon's knife. You remember
the Celestial Surgeon of Stevenson:
"If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness ...
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain,
Knocked at my sullen heart in vain:--
Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take,
And stab my spirit broad awake."
Something of what he means is, I suppose, humorous. What he means
is that something must pierce below the surface, something must
get home; anything is better than faltering in our great task of
happiness, being dead to the blessings of life that GOD gives us.
Sometimes we have to stand up and say: "Thou art the man." "It is
not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife." We have got to
say this whenever there is occasion for it. We have got to speak
out for the sake of the man's soul. It is not easy, but we must be
prepared to do our part as celestial surgeons. There is many a man
who has lived to bless his parish priest for telling him the truth
about himself. He has been very angry at first, and full of bluster,
but thankful afterwards. We must never be afraid to be celestial
surgeons in the sense of doing the best for our patients.
(6) Well, then, directly you have done that, be ready to pour in the
oil like the Good Samaritan. There he is, delightful man, putting
off his business to look after the poor man, and we are to remember
to our shame that the priest and the Levite had passed by him. Pour
in the oil of sympathy. It seemed a very little thing to repeat that
commonplace bit of comfort to the mourners; often you may hesitate
to write that letter to the tenth man or woman who has lost his or
her boy in the war. That letter, written in love, is like the oil;
it comes as a healing balm. You have poured in loving sympathy.
You cannot have too much of it to give away. The good physician is
full of pity even while he uses the drastic medicine, and the best
surgeon is wonderfully patient. "When I lost my boy, when he hung
between life and death, then I found out what my parish priest was
like," people should be able to say. If we have not got sympathy,
and cannot pour in the oil, where are we? The world expects us to
be kindly, loving, sympathising, sacrificing physicians in times of
trouble and sorrow.
(7) And then, once again, do not forget the after-care. We have
"after-care committees" for our children when they leave school,
but we _are_ an after-care committee for all our people's souls.
Our LORD understood all about after-care. When He healed the little
girl, He commanded that something should be given her to eat. He at
once thought of her needs. He wanted to strengthen her after the
strain that she had gone through.
And that brings us to the beautiful work of our guilds. There need
be no particular kind of organisation, but we must in our parishes
look round and see that everyone has what he wants--see that men and
boys, women and girls, are looked after. When they are cured, have
we provided that something should be given them to eat, something to
strengthen them? Do we carry out the after-care which every good
physician and surgeon always displays?
I always remember, from my East London days, a little pamphlet
written by the present Bishop of Southwell. It was called "From
Marriage to Marriage." It made a great impression on me at the time.
I cannot remember all he said, but the point is this: We were too
much inclined to imagine that everyone had to go through a dreary
course of falls and rescues. But if we really shepherded the little
child from the moment he was born, it would be different. Let us
begin with the young couple. From the time they leave the church
we have to look after them. And then, when their child has come,
we have to take care of that little child and shepherd it from
the very start. If we do not do that, we have left out our most
important work. There is a great deal of work upon which we are
engaged--_e.g._, rescue work--which would not be on such a gigantic
scale if we had real after-care committees thoroughly at work in the
Church from the time the people are married.
We must examine ourselves to-day, then, very strictly from the
point of view of being good physicians: "What about my parish? Are
my people dying under my hand, through my carelessness or want
of skill? Are there any whom I do not know or who do not know me
because I have not won their confidence? Do I visit them as much
as I can, and find out what is the matter with them? Am I treating
them with loving patience, and yet with frankness and courage and
tenderness, looking after them right on to the end?" When the
Apostles healed a man they gave us the true spirit in which to do
it. "In the name of JESUS CHRIST rise up and walk." Not in their own
name, not in their own power, but in the name and power of JESUS
CHRIST. They did not try to be popular people and make people like
them; they had but the one idea, to make it perfectly plain that the
power of their LORD was present to heal; and the result was that
the man leapt up, stood, and walked, and was seen afterwards in the
Temple walking and praising GOD. If in our healing work we keep
out the idea of self, and work as good physicians and celestial
surgeons in the name of CHRIST, the effect of our work will be
that we shall see numbers in the parish, perhaps paralysed before,
walking and leaping and praising, not us, but GOD.
III
FISHERS OF MEN
We have meditated upon our work as messengers, and then on our work
as physicians and surgeons; but the duties given us are so various
that it ought to make us feel how extraordinarily full of interest
our work is. Every faculty of the mind and spirit is wanted for this
wonderful work. We are called sometimes stewards representing the
Master to the people of the world, looking after the menservants and
the maidservants, foraging for the food of the household and giving
it out. Then another time we are watchmen on the walls of Jerusalem,
walking up and down watching over the city and blowing the trumpet
when the danger comes, continually holding up our hands in prayer.
We do our work as messengers running with a message, as physicians
and surgeons going up and down the ward, and then suddenly we hear
a voice ring, as it were, from heaven: "Follow Me, and I will make
you fishers of men." Here we have quite a different picture--the
wind-swept deck of the fishing-smack in the teeth of the tempest.
"Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and ye shall find."
We are fishers fishing for men. What a different picture from the
others! And I think we ask, rather sadly, some of us, who have been
working night and day, whether we are successful fishers of men. We
say: "Master, we have toiled all the night and taken nothing." I
have this huge parish of ten thousand people to look after, and what
is the result of my work among them? Have I been a successful fisher
of men? And that makes us, of course, ask ourselves in a day like
this: "What is the secret of successful fishing? If I have toiled
all the night and taken nothing, and all the day and taken very
little, what ought I to do? My time is getting on; the evening will
come, my fishing will be over. Can I not discover in the presence of
my LORD to-day what He would have me do different from what I have
been doing, that I may bring to His feet a greater harvest of souls
than I have ever brought yet?"
(1) And the first secret of successful fishing is _variety of
method_. There are some of us, no doubt, who do fish on our holidays
in the literal sense, and we know how again and again in the salmon
rivers we have tried fly after fly. And yet in our fishing for
men we often tie ourselves down to one monotonous kind of method,
never thinking of varying it. But if we have found one method
fail, surely we might try another. Why should we be tied down to
one particular humdrum method if it has been tried for years and
failed? Of course, there are certain things which must be the same.
We have no right to complain for a moment of what some people call
the monotony of Mattins and Evensong for ourselves. Mattins and
Evensong are not at all monotonous. I remember thinking, when I made
that promise which everyone makes when they are ordained, of obeying
the Prayer-Book and saying Mattins and Evensong every day, that it
would be a kind of slavery to me. But, on the contrary, I find it
a chain that binds me about the feet of GOD. The lessons in these
services are four "letters from heaven" every day, as Canon Liddon
called them. We have spent an immense time in Convocation--nine
years--in considering what variations in the authorised services
of the Prayer-Book may be admitted, and we have almost agreed upon
a supplementary book which will give an immense variety to the
service: a great many more antiphons, a rewritten preface to the
Confirmation Service, the Marriage Service carefully revised, and
some things definitely sanctioned for the Church at large which we
have used under provisional sanction in this diocese. We hope to
have the new supplementary book out at the end of the war. Think,
for instance, of the Psalms. Has not the Great War revealed to us
the depth of the Psalms--"the war-songs of the Prince of Peace,"
as they have been called. The war has given to many a new meaning
which we never saw before. And think of all the needs of the sick
of the parish, and our personal needs, all to be woven into these
beautiful services which we use every day, and which seem to bind
us to the feet of GOD. If any of you have drifted away from your
regular use of Mattins and Evensong, or if you have not started it
in your own churches, make a resolution to start it from to-day.
When your people hear the bell ring, that will tell them that at any
rate the clergyman is at his prayers.
Of course, we do not want our beautiful services to be altered in
substance; but we may have variations sanctioned by authority. In
fishing for men we are not bound by one method. If we find that
one method does not succeed, we must try another. I have already
sanctioned in the diocese a shortened form of Evening Service.
For those not reached by services in church we must have open-air
services. People will listen at the windows in the little square or
street in which they live. There must be, too, special services for
such organisations as Boy Scouts and Church Lads' Brigade. For the
ordinary Sunday-School we are now able to have new methods provided
by experts for the diocese. Then, if the Sunday-School system does
not seem to suit your particular parish, try catechising in church.
I am only suggesting--it is not for me to lay down this or that rule
as to what is to be tried. My point is this: With the HOLY SPIRIT
guiding you, and with the inventiveness of love, you will be able to
bring out of your treasure things new and old. Although one of the
oldest things in the world, the Church is yet the youngest. We never
grow old, and, acting with the inventiveness of youth, we ought to
be thinking out new plans and new methods all the time; and while I
am speaking upon the inventiveness and freshness of the successful
fisherman, I need not say that I shall be only too happy to sanction
almost any new experiment you may wish to make in fishing for men,
if you will submit to me the prayers you think of using, and if
I think the suggested method consistent with the teaching of the
Church to which we both belong.
(2) Then there must be, too--every true fisherman knows this--a
_ripple on the water_ for fishing, best of all a light breeze in
the morning. That means that it is a fishing-day. And do you not
know what I mean when I say that there seems to be no ripple on
some parishes at all? The whole of the surface of the parish seems
as dull as ditch-water--no ripple, no fish. If there is no sense of
expectancy, no keenness, no enjoyment, no happy spirit, among the
workers, there will be no fish. I would like you to ask yourselves
whether there is such a ripple in your parish, or whether it is
all very dull and dead. And I would like to ask anyone who seems
to recognise that there is nothing going on, and that there has
been no catch, yesterday, to-day, or the day before, to ask himself
if he cannot go back and create a ripple in the parish. When you
think over how that ripple is to be created, of course, it can
only be by the power of the HOLY SPIRIT brooding over the waters,
as He originally brooded over the waters and brought cosmos out of
chaos. I believe the chief way, if I may reduce the metaphor to
prosaic terms, the chief way must be by constantly praying for the
parish and the people, that the HOLY SPIRIT may come and stir the
dulness by creating a spirit of expectancy and a joy in the work.
When you are obviously enjoying your work yourself, and making the
Sunday-School teachers and the workers enjoy it, you may expect a
ripple in the parish. Joy in the work is a most attractive thing.
There must be the joy throughout the parish, among clergy and
workers; the curates and the Vicar must be at one, with no friction
between them, and they and the workers a real band of brothers and
sisters all fishing in the same waters. Pray very earnestly for
this. I shall not bring in more at this point about the necessity
for intercession. Remember that it is the parish priest who is
perpetually praying for his people individually, and teaching his
people to pray, who is the most successful. In my experience it
is the praying parish that has a ripple on the surface. I see a
wonderful quantity of fish caught in a parish of that kind.
(3) Then think what is the cord or line by which the fish are
caught. "I will draw them with the cords of a man," by human
influence, by _personality_. Now this question of personality is
a very difficult one. Dr. Newman is said to have stated that he
dreaded personal influence. Well, of course, it is quite easy to
see what he meant. He dreaded such personal influence in religion
which is used to make people simply like us or to draw them to
ourselves and to leave them there--that is to say, he dreaded
a misuse of personal influence. So misused, no doubt, personal
influence is a dangerous thing. But that does not alter the fact
that people are drawn to CHRIST by personal influence, and that we
must use our personal influence if we are to be successful fishermen
for CHRIST.
And that brings me to this personal question: Is there anything
in ourselves that puts people off? I wish to be perfectly frank.
Is it not a fact that we clergy sometimes do put people off by
our manner and appearance? Even the smallest thing is important
if it is going to spoil the line or cord that is to draw people
to CHRIST. I believe we put off people more than we know by
carelessness about our appearance, or manner, or matters of that
kind. So much depends on us that we cannot take too much care of
our personality. We should see to it that when people meet us they
can see the attractiveness of goodness in us, and be drawn to our
LORD because they are first attracted to His representative. And do
ask yourselves--I might seem to be personal if I went into details:
Is there anything in my manner that is spoiling CHRIST'S work so
that He cannot fish with me, cannot draw others through me? Is it
because I am not humble enough, or is there something in me, some
unattractive feature or characteristic, that is spoiling the fishing?
(4) And then, of course, there must be the _hopefulness of the
fisherman_. The true fisherman is nothing if he is not hopeful.
"Master, I have toiled all night, and caught nothing; nevertheless,
at Thy word I will let down the net." The true fisherman never
knows when he may be successful; he is always expecting something
at the last moment, and he manages to infuse hopefulness into his
fellow-workers; he hopes that there is going to be good fishing in
the day or the night. I had a rather touching illustration of the
value of hopefulness in a little hospital near where I was spending
a holiday. Five sisters, friends of mine, who really managed the
whole hospital, sent a telegram from the village asking if I
could come and see one of the young soldiers, whom they could make
nothing of. He was absolutely in despair. He had lived a bad life,
and I think it was the presence of these five good girls who were
nursing him that made him feel the contrast between his life and
theirs, with all its purity and goodness. The contrast brought him
to repentance. Still, he thought it was too late to change. He could
not be forgiven. I went to the hospital. There he was, a young man
about twenty-eight, really in despair. It took me a long time to
get any hope in him. At last, when he had gone into his whole life,
and I had given him absolution, and had a prayer with him, I saw a
sort of hope come into his face. The change was extraordinary. He
said: "Will you pray with me again, Bishop?" In all my experience
I have not very often been asked like that to pray again with a
man. They are generally shy, and satisfied with the first prayer.
I prayed with him a second time. He wrote me afterwards a charming
letter, asking me to send him a Bible and Prayer-Book, which I did.
What that man wanted was hope, nothing but hope; he was in despair
about himself. "GOD shall forgive thee all but thy despair." We
shall never catch a man like that unless we can infuse into him that
glorious hope which we have ourselves. I persuaded him that he was
not too late, and he was saved by hope.
Now do let us carry back the hopefulness of the fisherman to our
parishes, whatever may have happened in the past. Many of you have
been in your parishes very many years, and no doubt sometimes you
have felt very despondent. Start again to-morrow as if you had just
begun. Though you have toiled all the night and perhaps caught
nothing, cast your net on the right side of the ship, and the next
five years will be the most fruitful years your parish has ever
had. People will notice a different spirit about yourself. Try a
completely new method, and you will have a wonderful success. There
will be a ripple on the water which there has not been before. Be
hopeful about it, and then, if you have to stay on in the same
parish five or ten years more, it may be a wholly different story
from what it has been up to now.
(5) In the next place, a successful fisherman must have a _very
deep faith_. Of course, the ordinary fisherman must have some sort
of faith. The good fisherman believes certain things all the time
he is fishing. He believes in the laws of the wind, studies them,
and acts according to them. He sets his sail according to them, if
he is fishing in the sea, and he knows that he must do so if he is
to reap of the unfathomable harvest of the sea. He believes in all
these things, and on a stormy coast he must be a man of great faith,
dealing with great unseen movements and powers all round him. He
learns their laws, and he knows that if he acts according to those
laws he is successful as a rule. But do you not see that we are
just like that ourselves? Really we are in touch with all kinds
of unseen powers and movements. We have to believe, for instance,
in the salvability of every soul in the world; we have to believe
that every soul is meant for the Gospel, and the Gospel is meant
for every soul. We have to believe in that man in the worst slum
of our parish; we have to realise that the Gospel is fitted for him
and he is fitted for the Gospel. No one has ever been found yet who
could not be made into a bit of a saint in time. And the Gospel,
tremendously deep as it is, is also so simple that the simplest
can understand it. That is the wonderful thing about it. We have
to believe in it--intensely believe in it; we have to believe in
the wonderful power of these tides of the SPIRIT sweeping round a
parish and working wonders; we have to believe in the influence of
the unseen wind that blows over it and to pray often: "Come from the
four winds, O breath, and breathe upon them."
We are, as a matter of fact, working amidst unseen and tremendous
forces. We talk about the power of GOD. The power of GOD! Why, He
keeps the whole universe going, twenty million suns always moving on
through space. He alone knows whither they are going. Twenty million
burning suns! look at the power of that; think what power that
alone implies! and then think of the saving power of one drop of
blood shed upon the Cross, when you consider Who it was that hung
there. Think, again, of the wonderful influence, the downrush of
the SPIRIT: some of you have seen it in missions; we believe in it
at every Confirmation. We are really in touch with most tremendous
powers. If we had more faith we should be better fishermen.
Therefore we do want a stronger faith in our LORD Himself, always at
the heart of our work, a real living faith in a living LORD with us
all the time.
(6) And then, sixthly, we must fish for men _one by one_. Of course,
we can have great concerted movements. I shall never forget a
midnight march through Westminster at half an hour after midnight on
a Saturday night. We swept like a net, bringing quite twenty young
men out of every public-house. As we counted them in the church
school, we could see that most of them were three-quarters drunk.
We could see what would be prevented if the public-houses of London
were shut earlier, as, indeed, they now have been during the war. It
has benefited Russia greatly that she has abolished the whole vodka
traffic. We could not take pledges that night from those men: they
were not in a condition to make them; but the Church of England,
with all her great organisation, ought to be able to prevent that
sort of thing, and catch these souls one by one. Here comes in
the need of personality; we must talk to each of these young men,
provide somewhere else where he may spend his evenings, and remember
that you can only catch fish one by one.
(7) And the last point of all is that, to be successful,
the _fishing-fleet must be kept together_. You really are a
fishing-fleet, and not merely individual fishing-boats. When a
deanery is kept together, it shows a brotherhood, a cohesion, which
is a very beautiful thing to see. To a large extent you are such,
but, still, even the best-worked deanery can resolve to work more
together than they have done, in happy co-operation, the clergy
and people of each parish taking an interest in another's parish,
rejoicing in its successes and praying for it in its troubles. If
the whole deanery meets regularly for united intercession, this must
have a great effect upon the mission work in the district. It must
have an effect also upon mission work among the heathen for the
Church at home to feel part of the same fishing-fleet as the Church
abroad, the workers in one ship beckoning to their partners in the
other ship to come and help them.
Well, then, take back with you these simple thoughts which I am
trying to put before you as your Bishop and fellow-priest. Pray
to be made more keen, more alert, more active and enthusiastic
messengers. Pray to be skilful, patient, thorough, good physicians,
and kinder celestial surgeons. And, perhaps above all, pray to be
hopeful, faithful fishermen; go out together as a fishing-fleet
on the great ocean, believing in all the possibilities which lie
beneath the surface; realise the presence of your Master directing
from the shore the whole fleet. And then at the end of all things,
in the morning of the great day, you will have a harvest of souls to
draw to the shore to His feet.
III
TO GIRLS
WHAT A GIRL CAN DO IN A DAY OF GOD[23]
[23] An address to two thousand girls in Nottingham.
When I think of all the vast influence exercised by those in this
hall, I feel inclined to say what Bishop Selwyn said in the midst of
Eton Chapel--"You can turn the world upside down."
But, before I say anything of my own, I want to emphasise what
has already been said to you, with regard to the influence at
the Front of those who are here at home. As I went down behind
the firing-line in 1915, and held seven or eight services a day,
before each service began I invariably said one thing from end to
end of the line. I said: "I have come here, boys, before we have
any service, to bring you the love from home of your mothers, your
sisters, and your sweethearts." And you saw the soft look that came
into those boys' faces while the guns were firing--and sometimes
an aeroplane was guarding the service for fear the Germans should
not be able to resist a target of four thousand men, and a Bishop in
the middle--you would know what they think of home, and how you have
got the heart of the Empire in your keeping. One of the boys who
has died the death of honour wrote home to his mother: "I have come
here, mother, for one purpose--and that is, that you and the sisters
shall not be treated like these Belgian women have been."
I am going to put the message at the very highest at once. I have
never found young people fail to rise to it. I am going to put upon
your lips, as your resolution, no less a resolution than was on the
lips of our Lord Himself, our great High Priest, just before He went
to His own death--"For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also
may be sanctified in truth." I say High Priest, because I am going
to put this one single thought before you as describing the function
which girls are to discharge in a Day of GOD, and that is, they have
got to be priests of GOD.
Now, that may seem to you a strange thing to say, but before I have
done I shall have failed indeed if you do not believe it. I am
always trying, in London, to unite all the great Christian bodies in
common action. We fight as one family, side by side, against evil,
sin, intemperance, and impurity. Every year all the denominations
in London elect me chairman of the London Temperance Council and of
the Public Morality Council, and it is by focussing the whole of the
Christian thought of London that we are as strong as we are, when
we tackle night clubs, and living pictures, and other abominable
evils, and destroy them in the name of the LORD. I say that because
I believe fully that if everyone understood what the teaching about
priesthood was it would take away much misunderstanding, and I
believe would join together many Christian bodies divided to-day.
_There is only one Priest in the Universe, and that is_ JESUS
CHRIST _Himself_. But He says Himself that the Church is His body.
Therefore, the whole of the Church is the body of a Priest. Those
of us who are called priests are ordained as organs of a priestly
body. We act in the name of the body, and therefore the idea that
we are setting ourselves up above this or that person is wholly
wrong, because we act as organs, as hands and feet--as it were--of
a priestly body. And mark you, the Church is the great company
throughout the world of all baptized persons, baptized by whoever
baptizes them.
If you think that out, you will see what a powerful idea this idea
of priesthood is. Have you ever seen a priest ordained? I wish
sometimes, though I am afraid you would fill the whole dome of St.
Paul's Cathedral, that you could come some day and see what to me
every time is a most touching sight: you would have seen those young
men, thirty perhaps, as were there at a recent ordination, brought
up before the Bishop, who has other priests standing round, and then
on the head of each, as he kneels in front, we all lay our hands,
and I say, "Receive the HOLY GHOST for the Office and Work of a
Priest in the Church of GOD." A young girl said once, "Do you mean
to say every clergyman I see has been through all that?" But now,
if that is so, why do I look round on you and say you are young
priests of GOD? Why? Because you are part of this priestly body. You
are joined to the one great High Priest, and therefore you, whom GOD
knows one by one, are known and named and called. Of course in the
Church Confirmation is the ordination of the lay priest, and if you
are confirmed, I am going to tell you five things you are expected
to do.
1. The first is to be _girded_. I have more to do in my life, and
naturally so, with young men and boys than I have with girls and
women, but that very reason gives me an added authority in speaking
to you, because I know what their difficulties are. I speak,
constantly, to as many young men as there are of you girls; I say,
knowing what difficulty they have at their age to control their
passions, that it is like ruling a horse. A horse is a splendid
servant, but a vile master. When you have got the bit in your
horse's mouth and the reins in your hand, a horse is a splendid
servant; but let him off at full gallop, with the reins round your
feet and the bit in his teeth, then he is a terrible master. So it
is with the boys. They have got to be on the horse with the reins of
GOD's Commandment in their hands, and the bit of self-control in the
mouth, then their bodies are glorious servants. What you young girls
as priests have got to do is to help those boys and young men in the
very flower of their lives not to do anything which is afterwards a
stain upon their conscience. You can rally round them and, if you
are young priests, can help them.
There are three things of priceless value a young girl has on her
side in doing this. The first is her natural modesty. Why are we so
afraid of bad companions breaking down a girl's modesty, and why
are we so afraid of rough horseplay soiling the purity of her soul?
Because it is spoiling her first great gift, her first great power.
It is just that naturally beautiful modesty a girl possesses with
which she is meant to help every young man. That modesty is meant
to help her to be self-controlled, and to help him to be so too.
Then she has a most wonderful power of self-sacrificing love. I say
to the young men, "Never take advantage of the trusting love of a
girl"; but to you I say, you have that beautiful power of true love.
It is that power of sacrifice and self-sacrificing love which is
your great asset to the world. Never soil it, and never spoil it, or
let it be dragged down by anyone. And you have a naturally religious
nature. Those three things, those three splendid things, you have
got with which to gird yourselves. Allow anyone to rob you of them,
and you have lost your strength. Keep them and you have the first
great quality of a true priest of GOD. Gird yourselves with modesty,
unselfish love, and natural and supernatural religion.
2. And when the young priest has so girded herself, the next thing
she has to do in discharge of her priestly office is to _offer up
every day an oblation of prayer and praise to_ GOD. He is looking
for it every day. Do you remember the story contained in a poem by
Browning of a cobbler boy who used to praise God at his work every
day? He was wafted away to another sphere, and there was silence in
the workshop, and GOD said, "I miss my little human praise."
Make then your second resolution, that, having girded yourself, you
will never fail to offer to God this sweet incense of prayer and
praise, and do it perfectly openly. Don't be ashamed of it being
known you do it.
In "Studies in a Devotional Life," Canon Peter Green tells us how
he shared a room in a little hotel in South Africa with two men,
who looked like brigands. Not liking to say his prayers openly in
their presence, he slipped outside, and said them on the veldt,
only to find on his return the "bearded ruffians," who proved to be
Cornish miners, kneeling in prayer themselves. This so impressed the
writer that, when on one of the South African expresses he had to
sleep in the same place as three postmen, he overcame his shyness,
and said his prayers openly. Next morning, one of the postmen, an
old choir-boy who had forgotten to say his prayers for a long time,
confessed that the clergyman's action had shamed him, and he would
begin again that day. So the simple influence of one example ran
down the line.
3. Your third duty, and I get to love it more myself every year,
is not only to pray for yourselves, but to _plead for others_. On
my prayer-desk, there are two or three hundred intercessions for
mothers, whose sons are at the Front, and for the boys themselves.
What a beautiful task it is to intercede for them in turn, so many
a day! We are promised that our prayer shall be heard, your prayer
just as much as mine. Begin with intercession for fathers and
mothers, brothers and sisters, people you are next to at your work,
your parish, or the church you go to, and so on, extending right out
to the boys at the Front. Pray to GOD for victory; don't be ashamed
to pray for victory in a glorious, a righteous cause like this. Pray
that all this may be overruled for the spread of GOD's kingdom in
the world. And always pray for the lonely missionaries, so often
disheartened, so tired, so far away. And mind you, if you have not
begun doing all this, you are going to begin. When I went down to
a parish which had not been very efficiently worked, I collected
a number of girls into a club, and got them to come for their
first service. I had just become Rector of Bethnal Green, and the
committee of the club wrote: "DEAR RECTOR,--We think it our duty to
inform you that in our opinion our club service was a _success_, and
we beg you to have such a service for us every month _until further
notice_."
Well now, those girls were starting their religious life; but when
I go down now I find what I started as a little, tiny thing grown
and grown and grown; those people whom I spoke to first are now
grown women. It all goes on if you once make a good start. Therefore
do take up, if you have never taken up before, this process of
interceding. I am organising all the children in London this year in
intercession for the war, and when we pour in a million children's
prayers, is it not going to be a power which is going to bring down
the blessing of Heaven on our cause?
4. Then we come to the fourth task of the priest.
The fourth work of a priest is to consecrate or _dedicate himself
every day_. I do ask you to realise, as every day comes, what
possibility there is in a day. There was a young Bishop who was
consecrated the other day; I think he was the youngest Bishop
consecrated. I knew him very well, and I had just one minute to
write a note, and I wrote this, and he told me afterwards it had
been more help to him than anything that had been sent to him.
Therefore I pass it on to you: "Take one day at a time," I said,
"and trust the HOLY SPIRIT to see you through." Now I believe that
that is the real secret of spiritual life. Take one day at a time.
Don't worry. Don't be thinking of all kinds of difficulties in
future. Take one day at a time, and trust the HOLY SPIRIT to see
you through. Dedicate every day and consecrate every day. Think
over those whom you are going to meet during the day. Be prepared
beforehand for the special temptations and difficulties of that
particular day; remember that no day will ever come again, and that
every day has to be lived out as a young priest of GOD. If every
girl in Nottingham dedicated or consecrated herself every day like
that--taking one day at a time, and trusting the HOLY SPIRIT to see
her through--why, there would be a power of strength in this city
which would astonish the world.
5. Then we come on to the fifth great priestly task of _service_.
I was talking to a little boy of nine. His mother had turned his
beautiful home into a hospital for wounded soldiers. She herself
was girded, dressed as a nurse, and the little fellow was in bed,
rather seedy that day, and I sat down on his bed at his mother's
request to have a chat with him. He said: "I love, Bishop, having
the soldiers here; we cannot go back to our old life after the war."
There is nothing so good as a life lived out in service, every day
helping other people, and, if we are going to carry nothing else
away, we are going to carry away this, that there is nothing so
valuable as service. Even the lad's mother, a rich woman, who had
served for ten months as a nurse, said: "Had I only known, Bishop,
what to do before, I should have done it. This ten months has been
the most delightful service to me I have ever had in my life."
How can you girls, working girls many of you, serve in your daily
life? All the work you do for the nation in the great factories of
Nottingham, done honestly and straightforwardly, as young priests,
with no bad language or bad stories allowed amongst you, is all
recognised, and all blessed as part of your priestly service. But
you can do more than that. I find again and again that in London the
best Sunday School teachers, the best girl guides, the best members
of the League of Honour there, are hard-working girls. Their service
has gone beyond their professional work, and they also use their
leisure time at home. They are the best girls at home their mothers
ever had. I remember a father saying to me: "Mr. Ingram, I'm not
much of a churchgoer myself"--he did not come at all, as a matter
of fact--"but I will say this, that my boy as does go is the best
boy I have got." What we want them to say about the girl who goes to
church or chapel is: "She is the best girl we have got at home, the
most willing, the most satisfactory, and the most loving."
There, then, you have the five priestly functions to discharge, and
you have got to discharge them "_for their sakes_," as well as for
your own.
For whose sake?
First for the sake of the boys, who are dead. There is a beautiful
poem about the other world, which was given me the other day, and
which I pass on to you in the hope that it may bring a little cheer
in the dark night to any present who have lost their brothers, any
mothers who have lost their sons.
"Lest Heaven be for the greybeards hoary,
GOD, who made boys for His delight,
Goes in earth's hour of grief and glory,
And calls the boys in from the night.
When they come trooping from the War
Our skies have many a new gold star.
"Heaven's thronged with gay and careless faces,
New waked from dreams of dreadful things.
They walk by green and pleasant places
And by the crystal water-springs;
Forget the nightmare field of slain,
And the fierce thirst and the strong pain.
"Forget? GOD smiles to see them merry,
For His own SON was once a boy;
They never shall be old and weary,
But of their youth shall have great joy,
And in the playing fields of Heaven
Shall run and leap, new-washed, new-shriven.
"Now Heaven's by golden boys invaded,
'Scaped from the winter and the storm;
Stainless and simple as He made it
GOD keeps the boy's heart out of harm.
The wise old Saints look down and smile,
They are so young and without guile.
"Oh, if the sonless mothers weeping,
The widowed girls, could look inside
The Country that hath them in keeping
Who went to the Great War and died,
They'd rise and put their mourning off,
Praise GOD, and say, 'He has enough!'"[24]
[24] Katharine Tynan.
Secondly, it is for the boys who will come home that you have your
five priestly functions to discharge. They will come home very
different to what they went out. I saw this wonderful transforming
power as I went down the lines. Boys came out of the trenches, with
the mud upon their puttees, knelt down and asked me to confirm
them, thirty at a time (of course they had been previously prepared
by the Chaplains).
Many came to other services. They sang "When I survey the wondrous
Cross," while the guns thundered close by, with a reality which
it was impossible to mistake. Are they coming back to irreligious
girls, to careless sweethearts, careless sisters who neglect their
religion, to girls who would drag them down? No. Let us have here
a country and a Church worthy of its defenders, to which they can
return. Let us have such a work going on at home, side by side and
step by step with what is going on in Flanders and the Dardanelles,
that when they come back they may find a changed England at home.
For their sakes you must sanctify yourselves--for the sake, too, of
the little sister who looks to you as her model and her example.
You have more influence over her, perhaps, than anyone else in the
house, except her mother. For her sake be a priest of GOD, and--I
say it without the least sense of immodesty--also for the sake of
the children who are to be. I speak to-night to the future mothers
of the children of Nottingham, and it makes all the difference to
the young mother, as she looks round her children, and, when they
grow older, tries to influence her growing sons and daughters,
whether she can look them in the face without shame and without a
blush, and is only asking them to do what she tried to do herself
before she was married. For the sake of the children to be, exercise
this glorious priesthood. If you do you will ennoble Nottingham by
your action. You will make it a city set upon a hill; and "a city
set upon a hill cannot be hid."
IV
TO BOYS
THE EFFECT OF THE HOLY GHOST ON HUMAN CHARACTER[25]
[25] Preached in Marlborough College Chapel. The text is based upon
the report taken by the _Marlborough Times_, kindly lent for this
purpose.
"For he was a good man, and full of the HOLY GHOST and of
faith."--ACTS xi. 24.
I need not tell you, not only how much I look forward to my
Marlborough day, but also how much I have thought as to what message
I would give you. When I think of the many to whom I have preached
at Marlborough year by year, of the three hundred now dead, of the
hundreds more who are fighting, and of the fact that many of those
to whom I am speaking would soon, if the war went on, be in the
thick of it, I realise what a very solemn thing it is to come down
to Marlborough and give a message to my old school.
I will tell you what made me choose this message. The fact that
Whitsuntide this year comes on the same day as St. Barnabas' Day
gives me a subject, the most solemn subject I have ever taken
at Marlborough--viz., the effect of the HOLY GHOST upon human
character. St. Barnabas was one of the most attractive characters in
the New Testament, an example of attractive goodness. He was such a
_gentleman_ in all he did, and therefore, if we could have produced
in us, by the HOLY GHOST, the wonderful character that the HOLY
GHOST produced in St. Barnabas, we might have that description used
of us; just think what it would be for men to say of us--"He was a
good man, full of the HOLY GHOST and of faith."
What, then, is the effect of the HOLY GHOST upon human character?
You might say, "But do we have the falling of the HOLY GHOST, too?"
Why did we have that hymn this morning, "Our blest Redeemer, ere
He breathed"? I was asked to choose the hymns, and I chose that
one because it so beautifully describes the indwelling of the HOLY
GHOST on your Confirmation day, and that is what makes the School
Confirmation the crowning event of the year. At Confirmation you
have the falling of the HOLY GHOST in exactly the same way as
happened in the early Church. Yesterday, for instance, I confirmed,
under the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, two hundred and thirty
people of all ages. "What is the effect of the HOLY GHOST upon human
character?" Some people imagine that what is called "doctrine" has
no practical value. But is this true?
(1) The first thing that the HOLY GHOST does is to _convict the
world of sin_. He shows people what they really are. You may have
heard of the National Mission of Repentance and Hope, and wondered
what it was. I will tell you. I have just come from a tour round
twenty-four dioceses in support of that Mission. I do not for one
moment understand by that Mission that we do not believe we are
fighting GOD's battles in the war. I believe that those three
hundred Old Marlburians who have fallen in the war have died as
martyrs. I believe the world is being redeemed by precious blood
again to-day, and that that precious blood is being mingled with
_the_ Precious Blood. I believe also that the freedom of the world
and the national honour are being saved to-day by the precious blood
of our sons and brothers. It is, therefore, not because we do not
believe we are doing the right thing in this war that we are engaged
in this Mission; it is because we believe we are called to save
the freedom of the world, and the national honour, and to see the
Nailed Hand prevailing over the Mailed Fist, that we have to repent.
Admiral Beatty said, in effect, that we should never win the war
until the nations came back to GOD, and it is Lord Roberts (peace to
his ashes, and glory to his memory!) who, just before he died, said
we had got the men, the ammunition, and the guns now; what we wanted
was the nation on its knees. And it is to bring the nation to its
knees, back to GOD, that is the great object of the National Mission
of Repentance and Hope. A messenger in connection with that Mission
will very likely be sent down to Marlborough.
Meanwhile let the HOLY GHOST do His work. He is _the_ great
Messenger, _the_ great Missioner. Ask the HOLY GHOST to show you
yourselves as you really are. It is the hardest thing in the
world to see this (easier for a boy than a grown-up man), but we
cannot get on in the spiritual life unless we are shown ourselves
as we are. If a light is shown into a darkened room, the dust is
discernible on the furniture, and stains are seen where it was
thought no stains were; and we cannot carry out the teaching of the
Gospel, and cast the beam out of our own eye, until we have seen it.
All progress really begins with humility.
We must therefore let the HOLY GHOST show us ourselves as we are.
"What does GOD think of me?" should be the first question we should
ask ourselves, and the HOLY GHOST will give us the answer. But that
is only the first thing the HOLY GHOST does. If He left us there,
contemplating our stains, our infirmities, and our sins, it would
not be much of a message of a Gospel of Hope.
(2) No, the next beautiful work of the HOLY GHOST is that He takes
CHRIST and shows Him to us. I paid a touching visit the other day
to an old clergyman who, some people would have said, was past his
work. He was ill and in lonely lodgings, and I went to see him. The
old clergyman gave me a great lesson. Instead of complaining, of
saying that he had been a failure, had been neglected and passed
over, he said: "I hope I shall live a few years longer, Bishop,
to preach the glorious Gospel." There he was, lonely, ill, passed
over by the world, yet feeling the great joy of simply preaching
the glorious Gospel. We are apt to get mechanical about our
religion. Even in the lovely service here at Marlborough, we are
sometimes--very often, perhaps--wandering in thought, and inclined
to become mechanical in our religion. The HOLY GHOST makes it
living. He takes of CHRIST, shows Him to us, and makes the whole
thing real. Therefore, our second prayer should be that the HOLY
GHOST will make religion a reality to us, make us understand the
glory of the Incarnation, that GOD actually came to earth in mortal
form, for our sakes.
(3) Thirdly, the HOLY GHOST is the Comforter. He comforts us and
helps us to comfort other people. I remember, when I was at
Marlborough last year, that I had several boys in to see me, one of
them a little fellow who had lost his father in Gallipoli; and I
tried to comfort him. The HOLY GHOST is the only Comforter. When one
goes to a mother, as I have done, who has lost, perhaps, three sons
(and in this connection we at Marlborough shall always think of the
father and mother of those three splendid sons, the Woodroffes), one
is at a loss to say anything; one cannot comfort them oneself, but
has to depend upon the higher power; and my experience is that the
HOLY GHOST brings the Balm of Gilead, which no earthly agency can
produce, a heavenly balm of comfort for the mourners which enables
us to go out and comfort others. There is no comforter better than
the younger boy of a family, who, filled with the HOLY GHOST, goes
home in the holidays to comfort his father and mother in the loss of
an older son.
(4) But, of course, the old words "comfort" and "comforter," as
applied to the HOLY GHOST, meant far more than we call "comfort."
"Comfort" in the case of the HOLY GHOST, means far more than
sympathy; it means fortitude, courage, inspiration. The comfort of
the Comforter always strengthens; mere sympathy sometimes weakens.
We have got to bring home the bright view of death, to produce a
pride that "my boy, my brother, my husband, should have died." I
believe that we have not anything like a bright enough view of death.
It is the Comforter that can make us believe that. It is the
Comforter that can breathe fortitude into the splendid mothers and
wives of England, and to the lads in the trenches, up to their knees
in mud, facing danger every moment, that can bring fortitude to the
nation; and it is the task of the Church to breathe fortitude to the
nation to go on until the end.
(5) The HOLY GHOST has two more beautiful things to do for us, and
is always ready to do them. The first of these is to guide us. The
other day I heard the hurrying footsteps of a layman coming after
me in the street as I was walking to a meeting. The layman, who
told me that he was a churchwarden of one of the churches in the
Diocese of London, and had never spoken to his Bishop before, asked
for a message to give in an address. I gave him the same message I
had given to a young Bishop some months before[26]: "Take one day
at a time, and trust the HOLY SPIRIT to see you through." This is
a great truth, and one which I will pass on to you, as you leave
this place to take up your work in the larger world outside. I
remember having asked a rich clergyman, at the beginning of a Sunday
afternoon, whether he would go down and take a very poor parish in
the East of London, where there was no money and the credit of the
parish was very much shaken. He did not at first seem inclined to
go, and, thinking nothing more about it at the time, I went into St.
Paul's Cathedral, and preached upon the text, "Led by the SPIRIT of
GOD." In the evening I received a pencilled note from the clergyman,
stating that he had been in the Cathedral, that he was led by the
SPIRIT of GOD to go to the parish. He went, and splendid work he
did there. There is not one of you who need be left to your own
guidance; the SPIRIT of GOD will lead every one, and guide you all
your lives.
[26] Mentioned on p. 189.
(6) The sixth thing which the HOLY SPIRIT does for you is to pray
_in you_. It is not very easy to pray. I expect many of you get a
bit disheartened about your prayers; you kneel when "Preces" are
called in dormitory, and get up feeling cold and dead, and that it
is sometimes rather a matter of form. Prayer does not depend upon
feeling; we ought to pray in the belief that the HOLY GHOST will
pray in us, and in that way GOD calls to GOD, the deep calls to
the deep, and the smallest boy in the School is able to share the
supreme energy of GOD.
You see, therefore, that this doctrine or truth about the HOLY GHOST
is the most practical thing in the world. Resolve to-day that you
will really make your bodies temples of the HOLY GHOST. The boy
who is filled with the HOLY GHOST will be the merriest boy in the
School and the pluckiest at games; he will always be chivalrous and
unselfish, and there will be a something about him, besides, that
will really breathe the presence of the Heavenly Spirit, who dwells
in him. You must have a little more spiritual ambition, and all of
you make your prayer that you may be, like St. Barnabas, "good men,
full of the HOLY GHOST and of faith."
V
THE WAR AND RELIGION
THE WAR AND RELIGION
It was not until I had had a little correspondence with the
Secretaries that I decided upon the subject for my address as "The
War and Religion." I was very anxious not in the slightest degree
to violate any canon expressed or unexpressed with regard to the
subject of these addresses, and I think I can assure any in this
audience who may have their doubts upon this matter that they will
leave the hall without having their consciences offended in the
slightest degree, even if they may profoundly disagree with the
conclusions to which I may come. And I am encouraged in saying
this by a little incident which occurs every year. I am Visitor of
Queen's College in Harley Street, founded entirely by the influence
of Frederick Denison Maurice, and it is my pleasant duty to give
the girl members of it an annual address. My subject, at their
special request, is always Religion; and although quite a large
proportion are Jewish girls, I find that they look upon me in after
life as quite as much their friend as the others, and come to me in
their troubles, and they prefer that I shall speak to them out of
the deepest convictions of my heart, rather than offer them some
trite and colourless observations which mean nothing.
After all, there is great truth in the proverb that "the shoemaker
should stick to his last," and it cannot be entirely without
purpose that apparently about once in five years an ecclesiastic is
brought on to the scene here in his plain and sober raiment amid
the glittering galaxy of Generals and actors and scientists and
other distinguished men who in other years fill this distinguished
office. I have this summer had the high privilege of visiting
every battleship, battle cruiser, and most of the smaller ships
of the Grand Fleet of Great Britain, and the thousands of sailors
I addressed instantly caught the idea that of course I came to
represent "Religion." I told an East-End story which appealed at
once to the lower deck, so many of whom come from places like
Bethnal Green, Poplar, Stepney, and similar localities at Portsmouth
and Chatham. A rather shy East-End curate, on knocking at a door,
heard a voice from the wash-tub at the back ask in a shrill voice,
"Well, Sally, who is it?" and was rather depressed to hear Sally
shriek back, "Please, mother, _it's religion_." But, as I told
the sailors, my invariable advice to such a man is this, "Don't
be ashamed of representing religion; you were not dressed in a
pudding hat and a dog collar and a long black coat to talk about the
weather."
I make no apology then for plunging at once into the question
of "_The War and Religion_." It is very striking to notice the
different way in which the War has affected different minds with
regard to religion. While I have had some poor young widows throw
down their Bibles and (for a time) give up their prayers when their
husbands were killed, I have found others who in their sorrow have
found the comfort and force of religion for the first time; again,
on the battlefield, while some express themselves coarsened by the
"beastly work," as they express it, which they have to do, others
write, "Nothing does any good out here but prayer and trust in GOD;
we all feel it. War is a great _Purge_." Or again, "There are no
atheists out here; there are few of us who do not put up a prayer in
the trenches."
1. Let us look then first at the _case against religion_, and then
the special _case against the Christian religion_ as deduced in many
minds by the existence of the present War.
(1) I take Religion, as the word implies, to be a TIE _which binds
us to someone_, and I am further assuming that to have any religion
worth the name, that "Someone" must be good and just and Righteous.
Well, now, can we not easily see what a strong _prima facie_ case
could be made out against the existence of a really strong and good
and Righteous Supreme Being in the light of the appalling suffering
and the at present unpunished wickedness on a gigantic scale which
is being witnessed at the present time.
"Why did GOD ever allow the War? and if there is a GOD, why does
He not stop it?" is a question which is dinned into my ears from
morning to night by anxious mothers and even by men who have not had
time to think very deeply over the mystery of GOD's dealings with
mankind.
For nine years I used Sunday by Sunday to lecture and answer
questions in the great East London Victoria Park. I can imagine
the questions they are asking now. "Either He _cannot_ or He will
not"--this was always the favourite dilemma on which they sought
to impale me about the suffering in East London. "Either your GOD
_cannot_ stop it or He will not." "Either He is a tyrant who gloats
in it all or He is a weak ruler who has no control of His world."
And these questions, which were difficult enough to answer then,
are intensified in their point to-day. It is difficult to select
out of the horrors which have passed before our eyes one worse than
another, but probably the most hellish thing done on earth in the
last five hundred years has been the attempted extermination of the
Armenian race; even as described in the restrained pages of Lord
Bryce, it has more tragedy than any battlefield, for there at least
men die in the heat of battle for what they think a great cause, but
here, in cold blood and with every circumstance of bestiality and
lust, women and children were slowly done to death. And yet _"GOD
does nothing_." This is the accusation. No thunderbolt comes from
Heaven; the brave Russians do something to avenge the hideous crime,
but GOD--where is GOD? He is like the ancient gods described by
Tennyson--
"On the hills, like gods together,
Careless of mankind,"
and all this cry from sinking ships and praying hands is to Him
"A tale of little meaning,
Though the words are strong."
(2) But if the case against religion at all is strong owing to the
War, still more is the War supposed to be fatal to the _Christian
Religion_. Here into the world it came two thousand years ago with
a great flourish of trumpets about "Peace on earth, good will to
men," and what is the result?
After two thousand years, the bloodiest war which has yet taken
place on earth; waste of treasure beyond counting every day, and
waste of something much more precious than material treasure, the
precious blood of the best manhood of the world. I have received
their broken bodies into my own arms in the front dressing stations;
I have consecrated the graveyards where their dear bodies lie. I
know that tens of thousands of those who would have been the fathers
of the future race of mankind are lying beneath these little crosses
in Flanders or Gallipoli, and that many a maiden will die childless
to-day, because those who would have been husbands in the fair days
of peace are buried now in a soldier's grave.
And all this--and here lies the bitterness of the
accusation--started by the great Christian nations of the world. The
Mohammedan Turk joins in as the war goes on, but then only under
the influence or domination of a Christian Power. "Could you ask,"
cries the triumphant opponent of the Christian religion, "for a
more complete proof of the breakdown of your Christianity than the
spectacle of Europe to-day?"
II. It is clear then that we who stand for religion, and especially
those of us who stand for the Christian religion, have got our work
cut out for us to-day to answer these accusations. I want the men
and women whose work lies largely in other spheres to enter into our
difficulties. We are asking people not only to pray, but to pray
more earnestly and with greater faith and hope; we are not sitting
down with Buddhist resignation under the inevitable. "If it rains,
it rains, and if it doesn't rain, it doesn't rain," was represented
to me as the philosophy of the Indian troops whom I had the honour
of entertaining for a week in my grounds at the Coronation of King
Edward VII. On the contrary, we are in the midst of a great National
Mission of Repentance and Hope; we have the fullest intention of
winning the nation to GOD; we are adopting as our text the saying of
that grand old man, Lord Roberts, "We have the guns now, and the men
and the ammunition; what we want now is _a nation on its knees_."
We have indeed our task cut out for us, and I hope that it may
at least be of some intellectual interest, if not some spiritual
profit, to the thinking men and women here to hear the arguments
upon which we rely.
(1) In the first place, _we definitely repudiate the picture of GOD
as the arbitrary ruler_ who can do exactly what He likes; at least
we repudiate this as the revealed picture of the way in which He has
willed to act in His relation to mankind.
Probably the passage in the Bible which has given the greatest
colour to this idea, and which certainly is largely responsible for
the distortion of Christianity which is associated with the name of
Calvin, is the picture of the Potter and the Clay. "Shall the thing
formed say to him that made it, why hast thou made me thus? Hath not
the Potter power over the clay, to make one vessel unto honour and
one into dishonour?" This is the passage from St. Paul's writings
which is most widely quoted in this connection. At the first blush
this seems to confirm our worst fears; but when we trace this
illustration of the Potter to the original passage in Jeremiah we
find an absolutely different picture; the potter is a patient,
resourceful person who, so far from having arbitrary powers over
the clay, is being defeated at every moment by the refractoriness
of the clay with which he has to deal. He attempts to make, let us
say, a porcelain vase, but the clay will not respond to his efforts;
there is a flaw in the material, or the clay is not of the kind to
make such a design possible; he starts again with his "Gospel of
the second best," and this time he succeeds in making a humbler but
useful bowl. Or again, in the course of his work, something goes
wrong, and "the vessel becomes marred in the hands of the potter";
but even now he is not defeated; he tries again--to use the words of
Jeremiah--"_he makes it again another vessel, as it seems good to
the potter to make it_." This is the real picture of the potter, and
it is a touching picture when you consider that it is meant for all
ages to describe the dealings of GOD with the human race, of which
we ourselves are members.
Of course, the question entirely hinges upon what GOD meant mankind
to be. We used to discuss this question in East London Sunday after
Sunday--"Did He mean mankind to be like clocks, bound to go right,
like puppets who would dance to the strings which He pulled; or did
He mean them to be what we call human fallible men, who might go
right or wrong, but who in any case had the freewill to do either?"
And it is a striking testimony to the common sense of a great
working-class audience that, while they started with a predilection
in favour of being made to go right, after an afternoon's discussion
they invariably came to the conclusion that with all its risks it
was better to be men and women; that forced goodness was no goodness
at all, and that if GOD did wish to have as His companions in
eternity companions worth having, He could have done nothing less
than endow them with freewill.
Now, if this is so, it is obvious that the metaphor of the Potter
and the Clay has a great bearing on the question of "_The War and
Religion_."
Let us assume, as we are bound to do, that the first design of the
Great Potter was a porcelain vase of universal Peace. He made men
_of one blood_ in every nation of the earth; he loves to make men
"of one mind in a house." Work and trial were to be part of man's
lot, but not War. The idea that War is in itself a glorious thing
may be the doctrine of Treitschke or Bernhardi, but cannot, I
believe, be found in the Bible.
This, then, is His first design, but the clay will not take this
design. There is a stubborn element in human nature determined upon
War; there is a "throw back" to Paganism with which the Potter has
to reckon. It is not His fault. To coerce, to crush Freewill is to
crush His own Image in mankind, to make any kind of freely chosen
goodness impossible. He must give up for the time, with what regret
we can never know, His first design. He may see of the travail of
His soul _one day_ and be satisfied, but, for the present, He must
bring in the "Gospel of the second best." He will bring good out of
this evil; He will produce a bowl of unselfish service. The devil
makes the War, but GOD will turn the devil's own weapons against
himself, for He will produce a spectacle of unselfish service such
as the world has never seen before.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we are looking at to-day,
what we are seeing portrayed daily before our eyes. We have never
seen such a sight in our time before. With an unselfish devotion
which has been the admiration of the world, the young men have flung
themselves into the battle. To take our own nation alone, to imagine
that five million men would have freely offered themselves for
service would have been thought incredible in the year in which Sir
Ian Hamilton delivered the interesting address to you, which I have
read, on "National Service." Nor is it only the young men; there is
not an idle young woman in London to-day, and I do not suppose there
is in Birmingham; and as for the children, a little boy of nine
shall speak for them. Asked whether he minded his beautiful home
being turned into a soldiers' hospital, he replied, "I _love_ having
the soldiers here, Bishop." _We can't go back to our old life after
the War._
Even, therefore, without going further, as we are bound to do
presently with the special teaching of the Christian religion, this
conception of the Potter and the Clay relieves our minds of its
worst fears. God _does_ care for His human children; this slaughter
of one man by another is not according to His first or even His
ultimate design. He does not stop the mischief any more than He will
pick off with His Hand obstacles placed to-night in the path of the
Scotch express. He will not stop the wreck of it by main force, but
meanwhile He is not inactive. The moulding Hand is hard at work;
monuments of fortitude in matrons and wives, glorious specimens
of unrivalled courage in their sons and husbands, issue from the
workshop every day, and, to use the words of the Psalmist, "The
fierceness of man turns to GOD's praise."
III. But now we have a more formidable task, and that is to meet
the charge that the very existence, and especially the virulence of
the War, constitutes a _breakdown of historic Christianity_. I have
already admitted the force of the _prima facie_ case which can be
made out to sustain this argument, but a singular circumstance may
well make us pause before we follow this specious, but, as I hope to
show, shallow argument.
(1) _Japan_ has always held a very detached view with regard to
Christianity. Owing to local circumstances for a time a persecutor,
our great ally soon became too enlightened to follow a policy of
persecution, and when, later on, an alliance was concluded with
ourselves, a natural admiration for the great Western Power which
had become its ally led to at least a respectful attitude towards
the religion which that ally at heart nominally and officially
professed.
Then occurred the War, and here you might have expected the
intelligent and clear-sighted watcher from a distance to have
discovered the _flaw_ in the religion which its great ally
professed. It is an open secret that it has had the precisely
opposite effect; never were the Japanese more favourably disposed to
give a hearing to Christianity than they are to-day, and the reason
is not far to seek.
_They saw a great nation act up to the principles of the religion it
professed._
If in those critical hours when the decision hung in the balance
we had decided to abide in our sheepfolds and hear the bleating of
the flocks; if we had decided to remain encircled by the silver sea
and the mightiest navy in the world, and watch at a safe distance
Belgium ravaged and the coast of France harried by the German
Fleet, Japan would have assessed at its proper value the Christian
sentiments which we officially professed.
But when it saw its great ally, practically unprepared, in the
cause of the weak against the strong, in the cause of international
honour, to defend the freedom of the world, fling itself into the
battle, then it bowed its head in respectful admiration of a nation
which did not wholly in vain profess to follow One "who, though He
was rich, for our sakes became poor," and who, again, to use the
striking phraseology of St. Paul, "being in the form of GOD, thought
it not a thing to be snatched at to be equal with GOD, but made
himself of no reputation and took upon the form of a slave."
It may seem a paradox to say it, but Japan was clear-sighted enough
to see the truth of it, that with all our inconsistencies and
imperfections, the good old British race never did a more Christlike
thing than when, on August 4th, 1914, it went to war. And surely
Japan was right.
The fallacy of the argument with regard to the breakdown of
Christianity from the War lies in the words "_Christian nations_."
_Is_ a nation a Christian nation which adopts as its governing
policy a pagan doctrine? There may be plenty of individual
Christians _in_ the nation, as no doubt there are, thank GOD, in
Germany, but no one who has ever cursorily studied Treitschke or
Bernhardi, or the utterances of the governing class of Germany, who
have imbibed the teaching of such leaders of thought, can imagine
that the nation which has prepared for this War for forty years,
which has prayed for this Day and longed for it, is really in this
sense a Christian nation.
We are getting tired, terribly tired--at least I am--of hearing of
these wretched men who have succeeded in indoctrinating a great and
powerful and efficient people with a virus which has turned them
into a curse instead of a blessing to the world. I only bring them
in as part of my defence of Christianity. I say it is a _monstrous
misuse of language_ to talk of the breakdown of Christianity when
what has produced the War is the _exact contrary to Christianity_.
There is no such precise contradiction to the doctrine of the Cross
as the doctrine of the Superman; there is no such absolute contrast
to the principles of the New Testament as the German War Book.
You can say, and justly say, that in failing to convert the German
nation, Christianity has so far failed in its world-wide mission,
and this I readily admit; but so has it failed at present to convert
the wild tribes of Central Africa and the millions of Chinese. All
that we claim is that the principles of Christianity, _when accepted
and lived up to_, change the face of the world; and we Christians
protest in the strongest way that a nation which avowedly acts at
a great crisis on anti-Christian principles is not in this sense a
Christian nation at all.
(2) But we go further than this; the progress of the War has opened
the eyes of other watching neutral nations besides Japan, as to the
value of Christian principles in the _conduct_ of War.
No one, I suppose, would deny that the whole idea of the Hague
Conference, and the rules which it issued for the conduct of War,
were a product of Christianity. It was thought two years ago that,
while the Christian religion might not have so far progressed in
the world as to render War impossible, at least that it would never
be disgraced by the murder and violation of women and children, by
ill-treatment of prisoners and non-combatants, and the sinking of
innocent merchantmen and trawlers.
Just as in the origin of the War Christianity justified itself,
so it has done in the _conduct_ of it. Mr. Washburn has described
the humanity with which the great Russian advance in Poland was
conducted--not a church damaged, except by accident, not a civilian
injured; whereas, while the world lasts, the names of Louvain,
Aerschott, _Lusitania_, Cavell, and Fryatt will cry shame on the
apostles of mere Kultur.
(3) But, on the other hand, let it not be supposed for a moment that
I am speaking _as if our own nation had no national sins_ to repent
of and no open sores to cure in this great Day of GOD.
I am myself "Chief of the Staff" of the great Mission of Repentance
and Hope which has already begun.
Short-sighted people ask to-day, "If we have a righteous cause,
what have we to repent of?"--but the true answer is, "_Because_ we
have a righteous cause, _therefore_ we must repent." I have spoken
of metaphors from the Old Testament, but there is a fine simile to
which I have not alluded, the simile of the _polished shaft_. "He
has made me like a polished shaft; in his quiver hath He hid me."
I fully believe that we are such a polished shaft in the Hand of
GOD to-day; that He feels down for the polished shaft which He has
prepared by years of discipline and dearly bought freedom, in order
that He may save through us the Freedom of the world; but _what
if we break in His Hand_, as nations have broken before? What if
our drinking habits, curtailed, it is true, for a time by drastic
regulations, but still producing a drink bill of 181 millions, what
if the ravages of lust in our nation, as shown in the statistics
published by the recent Commission, what if the constant neglect of
GOD Himself, so rot the polished shaft that it breaks in the Hand of
GOD?
It was not a Bishop--it was one of our leading Admirals--who
wrote: "Until England is taken out of her self-satisfaction and
complacency, just so long will the War continue. When she looks out
with humbler eyes and prayer on her lips, then she can begin to
count the days towards the end."
It is to bring the country back to GOD, _because_ it has a righteous
cause, which is the object and aim of the National Mission, and I
bespeak for it your co-operation in Birmingham, as well as your
earnest prayers.
What we aim at is a new England, a new British Empire after the
War, with all its old characteristics, with its old humour, and
its love of life, its vigour and its brightness, but sober, pure,
GOD-fearing; and beyond the Empire we look for a new Heaven and a
new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.
Why for ever shall we have bitterness between class and class? Why
for ever, when this accursed Prussian spirit of militarism is laid
in the dust for ever, shall we have the constant menace of War? Why
should there not grow to be a spirit of brotherhood in the world,
when not only class and class, but nation and nation, shall agree to
share the good things with which GOD filled the kindly earth which
He has provided as a home for His children?
(4) But it would be impossible to leave the subject of the War and
Religion without alluding to the part religion plays in throwing _a
bright light on Death_. I have no doubt that I am speaking to many
to-day who have given their best and brightest in this greatest
cause ever fought on earth, who, to paraphrase the famous words
of Ruskin, "will never see the sun rise without thinking of those
graves it first gilds in Gallipoli, and who will never see the
flowers bloom in spring without thinking over whose dear bodies
bloom to-day the wild flowers of Flanders." When I, an unmarried
man, think to-day of my own spiritual sons, dear to me as if they
were my own boys, who have month by month gone to their death, or
come home maimed for life, it is almost more than I can bear, and
I can do something more than merely sympathize with the father and
mother who have given one, two, three, and I have known even four
sons in the same cause. I do more than sympathize: I feel with them;
I suffer with them.
And so with all the young widows whose life's hopes have been cut
short in an instant. I live in the midst of the mourners every day.
But could I do any good, ladies and gentlemen, _without religion_?
I am absolutely certain that I could not. It is a mistake, even with
religion, to speak as if death was not death, and pain not pain. One
of the most touching things ever said to me was this: "We come to
you, Bishop, because _you do not underrate human sorrow_."
Underrate it! Why! my wonder and admiration is that they bear it as
bravely as they do. Never again to have the cheery letter; never
again in this world to see the dear face; never again to feel the
loving arms around them and the strong embrace.
But, while religion does not pretend to do away with pain and
sorrow, it is the one thing which makes it tolerable, which lights
up the darkness of death.
"As CHRIST died for the world, and my two boys have died in their
humble way for the world, may I not consider," wrote a brave Colonel
who had lost his two boys in one week, "that CHRIST looks upon them
as His comrades in arms?"
I need hardly say what my reply was. Why! to my mind, the world is
being redeemed by precious blood again, and this precious blood
mingles with _the_ Precious Blood which flowed on Calvary, and
becomes part of the redemption of the world.
Nothing really cheers the mourners as much as to feel that their
beloved ones have made a noble sacrifice, and have not made it in
vain. And with that, religion brings in the blessed hope, nay,
certainty, of _seeing them again_.
How many have I cheered this year with Miss Katharine Tynan's poem
called "The Flower of Youth"?--
"Lest Heaven be for the greybeards hoary,
GOD, who made boys for His delight,
Goes in earth's hour of grief and glory,
And calls the boys in from the night.
As they come trooping from the War
Our skies have many a new gold star."
* * * *
The poem is too long to quote in full, but it ends with these
beautiful lines:
"Oh! if the sonless mothers weeping,
The widowed girls, could look inside
The Country which hath them in keeping
Who went to the great War and died,
They would rise and take their mourning off,
Praise GOD, and say, '_He has enough_.'"
But we have no certainty of this without religion, and, as I
am conscientiously bound to say myself, without the _Christian
religion_.
It is very interesting and very helpful that scientific men, one of
whom is so leading a light in Birmingham, believe that on scientific
grounds they have reason to believe in an existence beyond the
grave, and in the continuity of personality. It used to help me
greatly in contesting the assertion that all scientific men were
opposed to all the tenets of religion; but as one who has often to
be with the dying, as well as the mourners, I should like to bear
witness to the extreme value of the belief in a real resurrection
from the dead, such as the Christian Church has commemorated for two
thousand years at Easter.
I should feel it quite out of place, of course, to argue with regard
to its truth here and now, but to a simple mind--and, of course,
religion has to be adapted to simple minds throughout the world,
which largely outnumber subtle ones--a single great _Event_ has ten
times the power of any amount of theory; and there cannot be a doubt
that it is a belief in the Central Fact of the Christian religion
which is as a matter of fact redeeming the world of mourners from
despair to-day--nay, more than that, filling them with a bright and
radiant hope, and a glorious fortitude to hold on with the courage
of their own soldier sons or soldier husbands "until the day dawns
and the shadows flee away."
Well then, I must just leave the matter there. I have never written
such a long address in my life, and don't expect ever to do so
again; but then it is only once in one's life one has the honour of
being President of the Birmingham and Midland Institute.
I hope that I have made at least my main points clear. We who
stand for Religion are not afraid of a discussion on "The War and
Religion." We do not for a moment think that the War has disproved
the truth of Religion, and still less of the Christian Religion;
on the contrary, we believe that it has demonstrated its value and
brought into clearer light its hidden depths; and we go further--we
say, that if War is to cease, we must have not less but more
religion, for we hope to see an old prophecy one day fulfilled,
"They shall not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountains, for the
earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters
cover the seas."
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN FOR WELLS GARDNER, DARTON AND CO., LTD.
* * * * *
Transcriber's note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been retained as
printed.
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