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Title: The War and the Gospel - Sermons & Addresses During the Present War
Author: Wace, Henry
Language: English
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THE WAR AND THE GOSPEL
THE WAR
AND
THE GOSPEL
SERMONS AND ADDRESSES DURING
THE PRESENT WAR
By
HENRY WACE, D.D.,
Dean of Canterbury,
Hon. Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford;
Fellow of King’s College, London.
London:
CHAS. J. THYNNE,
28, Whitefriars Street, E.C.
1917.
PREFACE.
As is usual in Cathedrals, it is the duty of the Dean of Canterbury
to preach on the chief Festivals of the Christian year; and most of
the following Addresses have been delivered in the discharge of this
office. My comfort in the performance of this duty, especially to an
audience of soldiers, in these solemn days, has been the sense that I
was commissioned to deliver the message of a Gospel which has “brought
Life and Immortality to light,” and which proclaims the good news of
the presence of a Saviour in all the circumstances Of life or death. I
have simply endeavoured, therefore, to bring some of the light of this
Gospel to bear on the distressing and perplexing experiences which this
War has forced upon us all, and especially upon those who have borne
its chief sacrifices. I am sure that, if only believed and realized,
the message of this Gospel is sufficient to support and to strengthen
us under all such trials and strains; and I hope I am not presumptuous
in offering these slight contributions towards that purpose to a wider
audience than my Cathedral congregations.
H. WACE.
CANTERBURY, January 1917.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE CHRISTMAS MESSAGE (preached in
Canterbury Cathedral, Christmas Day,
1914) 1
II. CHRISTMAS AND THE WAR (preached in
Canterbury Cathedral, Christmas Day,
1915) 16
III. THE THINGS SEEN AND THE THINGS
NOT SEEN (preached in Canterbury
Cathedral, Easter Day, 1915) 28
IV. THE EASTER MESSAGE (preached in Canterbury
Cathedral, Easter Day, 1916) 40
V. THE NEED AND THE MEANS OF RIGHT
JUDGMENT (preached in Canterbury
Cathedral, Whit Sunday, 1915) 53
VI. THE ADVENT MESSAGE AND THE WAR
(preached in Canterbury Cathedral,
Advent Sunday, 1914) 67
VII. DIVINE JUDGMENT AND RENOVATION
(preached in Canterbury Cathedral,
October 11th, 1914) 82
VIII. RESISTANCE UNTO BLOOD (preached in
Canterbury Cathedral, Good Friday,
April 21st, 1916) 97
IX. INTERCESSION FOR KINGS AND RULERS
(preached in Canterbury Cathedral the
Day of the King’s Accession, May 6th,
1915) 105
X. THE CHRISTIAN SANCTION OF WAR (Address
at the Service of Intercession in Canterbury
Cathedral, August 9th, 1914) 117
XI. THE WARNING OF THE TOWER OF SILOAM
(preached in Canterbury Cathedral,
October 25th, 1914) 129
XII. THE RIGHTEOUS IDEAL (preached in Canterbury
Cathedral, January 15th, 1915) 143
XIII. REASONS FOR INTERCESSION (preached in
Canterbury Cathedral, June 17th, 1916) 158
XIV. THE ETERNAL SOURCE OF GOODNESS
(preached at Holy Trinity Church,
Margate, November 7th, 1915) 173
XV. THE NATIONAL IDEAL (preached in Canterbury
Cathedral, January 3rd, 1915) 188
XVI. RELIGION AND WAR (from _The Record_,
Thursday, September 3rd, 1916) 203
XVII. PRAYER FOR THE DEAD (from _The Record_,
Friday, November 20th, 1914) 215
XVIII. CHRIST AND THE SOLDIER (preached in
Canterbury Cathedral at the Military
Church Parade, September 27th, 1914) 228
XIX. THE ETERNAL LIFE OF THE SOUL (preached
in the Nave of Canterbury Cathedral
at the Military Church Parade, October
15th, 1916) 239
THE CHRISTMAS MESSAGE.
A SERMON PREACHED ON CHRISTMAS DAY A.D. 1914.
“_And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly
host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth peace, good will toward men._”--St. Luke ii. 13, 14.
If Christmas this sad year is to be a real comfort and help to us,
we must realize very clearly what it is that was the cause of the
joy of the Angels, and has been always the source of the true joy of
Christmas, during the nineteen hundred years or more since that first
outburst of heavenly praise and song. The reason had been announced by
one Angel to the shepherds abiding in the fields in the words, “Fear
not; for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall
be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a
Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” The Jewish people were looking and
longing for the Christ Who would come, as is expressed in Zacharias’
song, to deliver them from the hand of their enemies, and to grant
unto them that they “might serve Him without fear, in holiness and
righteousness before Him all the days of their life.” This was the
promise which, as Zacharias said, had been given by the mouth of God’s
prophets since the world began, for which they had craved through long
suffering, and captivity, and disappointment; and it is this promise
which the angel declared was now fulfilled. A Saviour had been born to
them, One Who was able to realize for them the great hopes of blessing
which the prophets had held out. He would be able, in the words of
another angel, “to save them from their sins,” and by saving them from
their sins to save them from the sufferings and sorrows which those
sins had entailed upon them. By the birth of our Lord that had become
an accomplished fact. There existed from that moment One Who stood
between heaven and earth, between God and man, and united both--the Son
of God and the Son of Man, with power “to save to the uttermost all
who come unto God by Him,” and able, first by His sacrifice for our
sins, and then by His exercise of the royal authority and power which
are entrusted to Him, to put down all enemies under His feet, and to
deliver up the Kingdom to God the Father, “that God may be all in all.”
That is the grand consummation which, to the vision of the Angels, was
comprehended in this simple saying, “Unto you is born this day in the
city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.” Let us clearly
observe that it is not merely the future hope, but the present fact,
which causes the Angels’ rejoicing. The Saviour is born, the King is
revealed, the work of redemption is actually commenced. “Glory to God,”
they exclaimed, “in the highest, and on earth peace; goodwill toward
men.” The goodwill of God toward men is now embodied in the Babe Who
is Christ the Lord; or, as it is translated in the Revised Version
(in different words, but with the same meaning), God’s goodwill is
manifested “to men in whom He is well pleased.” It is much more than a
general declaration of peace and goodwill. It is a grand revelation, a
revelation which opened the heavens and evoked from a host of Angels,
such as had never before nor has since been seen, a burst of glory to
God for the blessing that from that moment there was a living Saviour
in human form in the world.
Now I wish to urge this fact upon you this morning in all its glorious
reality, because it is in that fact alone that we can find comfort
and help amidst the dark distress of such a Christmas as this, and
because it affords us the one supreme guidance in our deep perplexity.
The feeling is in all our hearts, and the phrase on many lips, “What
a contrast is exhibited by this tremendous and cruel war to the
words of hope and peace in the angels’ song,” and the old complaint
is uttered, Where is the promise of His coming--the coming of the
Prince of Peace? But we have only to consider the immediate sequel of
the first Christmas Day, to realize that the assurance given by the
angels, and their joy, involved no such facile creation of a time of
peace and righteousness as the eager hopes of men imagine. The first
result of the Saviour’s coming to His people, and claiming their trust
and allegiance, was that they rejected Him and crucified Him. He
rose from the dead and sent His Apostles to proclaim His resurrection
and His full assumption of His power as a King and Saviour, but they
continued to reject Him; and the result was that, instead of entering
on that Kingdom of righteousness and peace and glory of which their
prophets had spoken, their nation was crushed in scenes of “blood
and fire and vapour of smoke,” and all the bright hopes of Zacharias
were apparently extinguished. So the world went on, Christmas after
Christmas, and century after century, through successive scenes of war
and destruction and desolation, of which the spectacles of which we
read day by day afford us a horribly vivid example. If the angels’ song
had meant simply to promise peace on earth, it was contradicted by the
experience, not merely of bitter times like the present, but by every
year and every century which followed.
But where, then, is the fulfilment of the promise? You have the record
and the evidence of it in your New Testament. There, in the history of
the Apostles and disciples of our Lord, and in their Epistles, you
behold a body of men whose souls are filled with peace, and with the
sense of the goodwill of God, and who are living the life described
and enjoined by our Lord in the Gospels--the life of the Sermon on
the Mount, and of His parting discourses to His disciples recorded by
St. John. They are living in the midst of that world of passion and
violence and tyrannical domination of which I have spoken, and yet they
speak to us in tones of the most profound peace, and joy, and hope,
and even exultation. The reason is that, through faith in our Lord,
in His sacrifice, and in the promise of His spirit, they have found
peace with God--the peace of which the angels spoke; they live in the
blessed assurance of His goodwill, and they look forward with infinite
rejoicing to His return, to establish, as He promised, a new heaven and
a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
That spiritual Kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy
Ghost has subsisted continuously from that time to this. It is here in
the midst of us. There are souls whom we are privileged to know, who
are visibly living in that kingdom of Divine peace and goodwill, and
who, when they leave us here, pass, as we and they are assured, into
fuller realization of that kingdom, looking forward to its complete
establishment and revelation at the Day of the general Resurrection.
That is the kingdom Of the Lord’s elect, of the Saviour’s followers,
of the saints--perfect or imperfect, but still saints, of all ages,
the Church of Christ and the Kingdom of God. It is a kingdom within
which every Christian soul is admitted by baptism to his place and
his privilege, and it rests only with him to claim its blessings by
his faith and his life. In a word: the Acts of the Apostles and the
Epistles are the record of the fulfilment of the angels’ promise of
peace and love and Divine goodwill, for all who would submit to the
King and Saviour whose advent they proclaimed, and who would receive
His blessings in the way in which He offered them. To all whom would
“repent and believe and be baptised in the Name of Jesus Christ for the
remission of sins,” the promises of the angelic song were fulfilled,
and they have been fulfilled similarly to this hour.
But has the promise, then, no bearing on the ordinary secular life
of mankind? Are the instincts of men wrong in looking eagerly to it,
as they have done from generation to generation, for the prophetic
assurance of peace between men, as well as of peace between men and
God--of goodwill from man to man, as well as from God to man and man
to God. Most certainly they have not been wrong in that eager hope and
expectation; but where they have been wrong, and still are wrong, is in
their conception of the methods and means by which that secular peace
and those purely human blessings and happiness are to be realized. If
Christ is, as the angels said, the Saviour, the Saviour of the world;
if He is the King Who alone can save His people from their sins; and if
war and all the miseries of the world are, in one form or another, the
consequences of those sins, then the only way of obtaining salvation
from those sins, and deliverance from those miseries which are God’s
judgments upon them, is by submitting ourselves entirely to Him,
repenting of our failure in obedience to Him, living only by His laws,
and seeking His grace and His Spirit for our guidance and inspiration.
Have we done that? Has Europe at large been doing it these last fifty
years?
People ask how such a war as this can be possible after nineteen
centuries of Christianity. What do you mean by Christianity? If you
only mean that, during the greater part of those centuries, there has
been a general and nominal acknowledgment of the authority of Christ
and of His laws, such a description of the condition of the world
during that time may be allowed. But if you mean a real submission
of the mass of men and women, in heart and life, to the will, the
love, and the Spirit of Christ, then we have not really had nineteen
centuries of Christianity, and the state of the modern world, out
of which this war has arisen, has not been a Christian state. It is
notorious for instance, and not impugned anywhere, that the spirit of
Germany, which has provoked this war, has not only not been a Christian
spirit, but has been violently anti-Christian. The Divine authority
of Christ as the King and Saviour of the world has been openly and
vehemently impugned for at least a generation or two, especially in
the public and authoritative teaching in the Universities, which have
such immense influence in German life. Christ to them has not been the
King of kings and Lord of Lords, the very incarnation of God, “the
brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.”
If we are honest, we must also acknowledge that in far too great a
degree the same failure has prevailed among ourselves. It has, to say
the least of it, not been sufficiently recognized in our literature of
late years, or in our public life, that “all form is formless, order
orderless,” which is not entirely subject to Christ and informed by
His Spirit. The very vice with which we now charge the Germans has
been more than a temptation among ourselves. We have had great writers
among us exalting statesmen and kings of the past on the ground of
their mere strength. It was a great English writer of the last century
who glorified Frederick the Great of Prussia as an example of a really
strong king; and it is not a long step from that glorification to the
worship which has been paid on the Continent of late to the supremacy
of strength and self-assertion. That is not the Christian spirit, and
the “red ruin and the breaking up of laws,” into which Europe is now
plunged, is to be charged, not to any weakness in Christianity, but
to a grievous neglect, and in some degree to the very negation, of
Christianity.
The peace and goodwill which the message of the angels promised is,
in fact, within the scope of Christianity, and might be realized in
the world at large, but solely on the condition of the true methods
being observed--on condition, that is, of Christ, and the law of
Christ, being acknowledged from the heart as the true and only source
of peace and truth and goodwill, and on the condition of penitent,
humble, and earnest devotion to Him. That is the one supreme condition
on which peace to the world is promised by the Gospel. When emperors,
and kings, and statesmen, and soldiers, and men and women in general
believe the angels’ proclamation that Christ is their only Saviour,
their only King, that He alone, by His sacrifice, His laws, and His
grace can save His people from their sins, then, but then only, may
they hope in the life of the State, as well as in that of the Church,
to realize the angels’ promise of peace and goodwill. In a word: it is
not by strength, nor by liberty, nor even by law, that the blessings of
which Christmas holds out the promise can be realized. It is only by
Christian liberty, Christian law, and Christian strength--that is to
say, liberty and law, and strength exerted in obedience to the will of
Christ--that these blessings can be obtained. It is not Christianity
that has failed; it is not the angelic song that has disappointed us.
It is nominal Christians who have failed, from not being Christians
in reality. And the angelic song has proved its truth by the very
disasters which have fallen upon men who have not lived as though
Christ were their Saviour and their King.
But, thank God, if these considerations point to our weakness, they
also point to our hope, and to the means for our deliverance. We have
still as much reason to rejoice as the angels had when they sang this
song, because the great joy of it lies in the eternal fact that there
is a Saviour and there is a King, Who, if His people will trust Him,
will save them from their sins and all the miseries that their sins
involve. If our own lives and the life of our nation and the life of
Europe can be made truly Christian, if we can bring more of the love
of Christ and the life of Christ into our daily existence, we have the
assurance that He will save us, and will extirpate the abuses and the
falsehoods which have brought the nations of Europe to this terrible
pass.
In a few days we are to have a Day of Humble Prayer and Intercession
to Almighty God. Let it be, above all, a day of humble acknowledgment
of our failure as individuals and as a nation in His true faith and
obedience. I would fain it had been called by the good old Christian
and English name of a Day of Humiliation. We ought to be humiliated.
We have, in such ways as I have indicated, been contented with a
half-Christian life in public affairs and in society. We and our
men of letters, and men of learning, and men of affairs, have been
affected with the same half-heartedness in our allegiance to Christ,
which shocks us when we see it displayed in all its nakedness in other
countries, and especially in the one which is chiefly opposed to us.
Let us be humiliated for it before God, not caring, in comparison with
our true relation to Him, what interpretation the world may put on our
repentance.
But let us also rejoice more than ever in the assurance of Christmas
that a Saviour has been born to us, that we have an eternal King in our
Lord Jesus Christ, Who can save us from our sins, and our ruin, and
ourselves, if we will but give ourselves up to Him absolutely. Let us
realize with infinite thankfulness that the souls of those who are now
sacrificing their lives for us are in His saving and merciful hands.
Let us be reminded by the angelic vision that we ourselves, and the
souls of those who have passed and are passing away, are not brought
merely into contact with the “blackness and darkness and tempest” of
war, but are come unto “Mount Zion, to the city of the living God,
and to an innumerable company of Angels, and to the general assembly
of the Church of the Firstborn and to Christ the Judge of all, and to
the spirits of just men made perfect.” Let us realize this more than
we have yet done. Let us realize the truth of the Angels’ proclamation
that Christ and Christ alone is our Saviour and our King, that He alone
can save us, individuals and nations alike, from our sins; and then,
in spite of all the distress and anxiety which surrounds us, this may
prove the most blessed Christmas of our lives, and it may bring us a
happiness which will last unto life eternal.
CHRISTMAS AND THE WAR.
A SERMON PREACHED ON CHRISTMAS DAY A.D. 1915.
“_Who hath saved us and called us with an holy calling, not according
to our works, but according to His Own purpose and grace, which was
given us in Christ Jesus before the world began, but is now made
manifest by the appearing of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who hath
abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light
through the Gospel._”--2 Tim. i. 9, 10.
There has never been an occasion in our own lives, and there have been
few occasions in the world’s history, on which we have had more reason
for unbounded thankfulness for the blessed message of Christmas. We
are celebrating this Festival to-day in a sadder and darker world than
any of us can remember, amid scenes of bloodshed and desolation, of
which an adequate description can only be found in the lurid pictures
of the Book of Revelation, with war and hatred all around us instead of
peace and good will, and with death and destruction raging over a great
part both of Europe and of Asia. If we had to confine our vision to
the present world, and to the prospects it offers, men’s hearts might
well, in our Lord’s words, be “failing them for fear, and for looking
after those things which are coming on the earth”; but Christmas breaks
upon this dark scene with a message and a promise, which enable us to
lift our hearts and hopes above this present world and this earthly
scene. The heavens are opened; a great illumination bursts upon the
world; and an innumerable multitude of the heavenly host are heard
singing, in tones of rejoicing and thankfulness, “Glory to God in the
Highest, and on earth peace, good will towards men.” They are good
tidings of great joy, proclaiming peace and good will from God towards
men--good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people, that unto
us was born that day in the City of David “a Saviour, which is Christ
the Lord!” Such tidings of great joy are the very things for which our
hearts are yearning amid the distresses, bereavements and sorrows, and
the overwhelming anxieties of the moment, and such are the tidings
which Christmas brings. Let us beware of allowing the heavy burdens
and sorrows of the hour to obscure, or to muffle, to our hearts these
tidings of great joy. On the contrary, the darker the hour, the heavier
the burden; let us open our hearts the more to this glory of God
shining round about us, as on this day, and to the tidings of great joy
which are proclaimed to us by the Angelic Choir.
It is well we should remember, in the first place, that, even though to
ourselves this hour is peculiarly dark, it is but an aggravation, and
we may hope a comparatively brief one, of human experience throughout
all history. That history has been from the first marked by two
aspects, in the sharpest contrast to one another. In the first place,
from century to century it has been one of incessant struggle, of war,
of the rising of nation against nation and kingdom against kingdom;
and the Book of Revelation depicts the world as ending in scenes of
greater struggle and desolation than have ever gone before. That has
been the terrible reality of human experience from the commencement
to the present time. But, on the other hand, throughout these
distressing scenes there has always been heard a moral and spiritual
Voice, assuring men that God was controlling all these sufferings and
struggles, and that all was working for good, alike to the world at
large and to the individual.
You have the representation of the experience of every generation of
men in the pages of the Bible, and especially of the Prophet Isaiah.
He is known as the Evangelical Prophet, because he depicts in deeper
and nobler tones than any other inspired voice that blessed promise of
good will, of which the final proclamation was uttered to-day. But let
us bear in mind the circumstances under which the glorious promises
which we recite and sing at this season were uttered. Let us listen to
Isaiah’s own description of them in the twenty-fourth chapter: “Behold,
the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it
upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.... The
land shall be utterly emptied and utterly spoiled: for the Lord hath
spoken this word.... All joy is darkened; the mirth of the land is
gone. In the city is left desolation, and the gate is smitten with
destruction.” These were the visible realities around him, but he is
inspired to look over them and through them; and he ends that passage
by declaring that “it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord
shall punish the host of the high ones that are on high, and the kings
of the earth upon the earth;” and that, at the last, “the moon shall
be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of Hosts shall reign
in Mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before His ancients gloriously.”
Isaiah and his fellow-Prophets were surrounded by scenes of war and
bloodshed and desolation as terrible as any we have around us in our
own day, and it was over these fields of battle and destruction that
the glorious songs were heard which are our delight and encouragement
at this season. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people saith your God. Speak
ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and say unto her that her warfare is
accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned; for she hath received at
the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” There is nothing more amazing
in the experience of the human heart, and more inspiring to ourselves,
than that these grand songs of hope and deliverance and comfort should
have echoed over the desolate fields of Judea, and lived in the hearts
of a people who were as crushed, and all but destroyed, as any of the
ruined nations of Europe of the present day.
It has been the same all through history. Even where there was not the
inspired voice of Revelation, there was still among the Greeks and
Romans the ineradicable hope of a Golden Age; and an inner witness
of God’s Spirit kept alive in the whole human race a firm belief in
His justice and His ultimate deliverance, both for the world and for
individuals, from age to age. Let us not think, therefore, that in the
strain and distress and suffering of the present hour we are undergoing
any novel or special experience; and if we should be tempted to be out
of heart, let us be shamed by the faith of the past, by the inspiration
of the Prophets, and even by the uninspired faith and courage of
mankind at large. Let us believe, through all, as they did, that the
Lord reigneth, and that though “clouds and darkness are round about
Him, righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” The
birth of our Lord, which we celebrate to-day, and the Divine Voice
which spoke in Him through human lips, have given us a final assurance
that He is reigning, and that He will judge the world in righteousness.
But it has done other things, of which my text more particularly
speaks, which are a source of still greater joy and assurance to us
individually. By the message which our Lord brought us, an infinite and
blessed light has been thrown over the great mystery which darkened
the minds, and dimmed the faith, of men before His time. The Apostle
says that our Saviour “hath abolished death, and hath brought life
and immortality to light through the Gospel.” Though looking first,
as we may and ought, with the Prophets, to the ultimate vindication
of righteousness and justice throughout the world, by the fulfilment
of God’s judgments in the struggles of mankind, there still remained,
and there remains at this moment, to many hearts among us, the mystery
of the sacrifice of life which such judgments involve--the mystery
of the destruction of thousands of lives precious in themselves, and
infinitely dear to those who loved them, and who lived with them and
for them here. Before the Gospel, men’s hearts strained at the burden
of that mystery, and it is wonderful that human nature endured it with
such courage and patience; but now, says the Apostle, God’s purpose and
grace in this bitter experience “is made manifest by the appearing of
our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath abolished death, and hath brought life
and immortality to light through the Gospel.”
It would be rather truer to the original, and more closely
corresponding with the facts, to say--not that our Lord hath abolished
death, for, alas! that still remains around us--but that He hath
brought death to nought, annihilated its power, and destroyed its
strength. “The last enemy,” we are told, “which shall be destroyed is
death”; but meanwhile, for every Christian soul, its greatest distress
and terror is gone because our Lord has thrown a glorious illumination
upon it, and has “brought life and immortality to light through the
Gospel.” He has enabled us to see beyond the grave, beyond those
dreadful battlefields, strewn with the bodies of those whom we had
loved and honoured, and has made manifest to us that they still live
on in a new life, and a glorious immortality. Who can estimate the
mercy to sad and sorrowing hearts of the establishment of that blessed
hope on the firm assurance of our Lord Himself, who, after suffering an
agonizing death here, appeared to His Apostles and declared, “Fear not;
I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and,
behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and
of death”? The pain of bereavement remains--that is like the loss of
a limb, which time alone can soften--but the definite assurance, from
the Saviour’s lips, that those who have died in His faith and obedience
have entered on a new and blessed life, must be of infinite comfort
to those who loved them. We are not left any longer to hopes and to
future expectations; but can grasp the assurance of present realities
which are vouched for by the Saviour who took our nature upon Him, who
lived our life, and died our death, and showed Himself alive beyond
the grave. This is what we owe to the Saviour’s birth, with all the
gracious revelation of which it was the commencement.
The Apostle’s assurance goes, indeed, beyond this illumination of our
present experience, and seems to throw a glorious light upon the whole
history of mankind. “God,” he says, “hath saved us, and called us with
an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own
purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world
began.” It is now made manifest by the appearing of our Lord Jesus
Christ, but it existed from all eternity “before the world began.”
If so, then through those long ages which preceded our Lord’s birth,
this life and immortality were given to the millions to whom His Name
had not been manifested, but who died in the discharge of their duty,
and who faithfully made the sacrifices which were involved in His
government and just judgment of the world. Christ revealed the wars and
sufferings of this world as the inevitable consequence of the operation
of God’s righteousness and justice upon the evil, the sin, and the
Godlessness of mankind. Sooner or later those sins and evils gather to
a head, in some great corruption of society and political life, in some
enormous crime of ambition or pride; and the righteousness and justice
of God, working through the ordinary laws of human nature, evokes some
tremendous reaction against them; and we behold the overthrow of a
great Empire, or a European Revolution, or a world-wide clash of the
forces of right and wrong. That is the course of history, as determined
before the world began by the inscrutable righteousness and wisdom of
God.
That is the condition under which the world now exists, and people
who talk of abolishing war are like people standing on the crater of
a great volcano, and trying to persuade themselves that there will be
no more eruptions. As long as there is evil in the world and God’s
righteousness in the world, you will have the moral reactions between
the two bursting from time to time into some awful conflagration like
the present. That is the revelation of the whole Bible, brought to its
culmination in the Book of Revelation. But what was manifested to-day,
and proclaimed by the Heavenly Hosts, was God’s love and mercy to
the individual souls who have been the victims of these convulsions,
and who might seem to have been treated as mere passing elements in
the temporal scene. At the Birth of Christ, and by means of it, were
manifested and assured God’s peace and good will to every soul of man
who passes through this brief scene of struggle and, it may be, of
death. It proclaims that for each individual soul death may be said to
have been in effect abolished, that for every one of them, according to
the eternal purpose of God, “life and immortality” have been prepared
and assured; and that the struggles and sufferings of this mortal life,
terrible as they may be, are not worthy to be compared with the glory
that was designed, before the world began, for those who do the will
of God. This is the blessed revelation of Christmas, and it is our
privilege to fix our eyes and our hearts upon it, amid the sorrows and
troubles of the moment; and in proportion as we do so, we shall respond
with our whole hearts and souls to the exhortation of the same Apostle.
“Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always
abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your
labour is not in vain in the Lord.”
THE THINGS SEEN AND THE THINGS NOT SEEN.
PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, EASTER DAY, 1915.
“_For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet
the inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which
is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal
weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but
at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are
temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal._”--2 Cor. iv.
16.
These touching words of St. Paul are based upon the grand truth to
which Easter Day is a standing witness. “Therefore,” he says, or “for
which cause, we faint not.” That cause is stated in the verse just
before, “Knowing that He Which raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise
up us also with Jesus, and shall present us with you.” The Apostle
had just been giving a vivid description of the extreme strain, and
almost mortal struggle, in which the work of his ministry involved him.
“We are troubled,” he says, “on every side ... always bearing about
in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus
might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. So then death worketh in
us, but life in you.” The Apostle was undergoing a strain which was
draining the very life of his body, in order to preach the Gospel which
was bringing life to the souls of others; but he endured it in the
knowledge that, even if it involved the sacrifice of his life, He Who
raised up the Lord Jesus would raise him up also by Jesus, and present
him in a new life at the day of the Resurrection. In this knowledge,
his experience that his outward man was perishing did not make him
faint, for he knew that his inward man was being renewed day by day.
If he was daily dying, he was but experiencing the dying of the Lord
Jesus; and thus, by entering into closer sympathy with his Lord, he
was becoming united also with His life. Christ’s resurrection in glory
was an assurance to him of his own resurrection, and the sufferings of
the moment were as nothing to him in comparison with that glory. That
affliction was, after all, light and momentary, when it was realized
that it was working out for him, more and more exceedingly, an eternal
weight of glory. The things which he saw and felt at the moment were,
after all, but temporary, whereas the things which were not then
visible were eternal. If the earthly frame, which was his present
tabernacle, were dissolved by death, he knew that there was ready for
him “a house not made with hands, eternal, in the heavens.”
Is not this application of the great message of the Resurrection
peculiarly opportune and welcome to us at the present moment? We are
living through a time when the things that are seen are distressing and
painful beyond anything in our experience--we might perhaps say, in the
experience of Christian Europe. We seem to have gone back, on a sudden,
to the days before the flood, when “the earth was corrupt before
God, and the earth was filled with violence”; and we seem to need a
re-issue of the Divine proclamation, after that world of violence had
been swept away: “Surely your blood of your lives will I require; at
the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. Whoso
sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image
of God made He man.” The curse of this violence and bloodshed is being
inflicted, day by day, upon innumerable homes; and day by day we each
apprehend it for our own families. In order to stay the curse, the
blood of our own brothers and sons is being poured out like water, and
the desolation of our homes is becoming more and more appalling. The
blood-stained fields of Belgium, France and Poland, the engulfing of
the innocent lives of women and children in the ocean--these are the
things that are seen; and we need some supreme assurance--nay we need
some Divine revelation--if we are to live through such experiences
in faith, and hope, and in Christian charity. We mourn, day by day,
the loss of precious lives, and we are appalled at the thought of the
further sacrifices of such lives, young and mature, which we fear must
be required; and so far as we look only on the things thus seen, our
hearts might well fail us. Like St. Paul, as he describes himself in
the context, “we are troubled on every side ... we are smitten down,
though not destroyed.”
Let us then observe the manner in which the Apostle meets this
overwhelming oppression. He looks off from the things which are seen
to the things which are not seen; “for,” he says, “the things which are
seen are temporal (or temporary), but the things which are not seen are
eternal.” Perhaps that is the first condition for our seeing things in
their true light. It is very difficult for us not to have our vision
almost wholly occupied by the visible things around us, which are also
the things of which we are the most immediately sensible, and which
naturally absorb our ordinary thoughts, feelings and energies. Yet, as
a matter of fact, as St. Paul reminds us, they are a very small part
indeed of the realities with which we are surrounded. “The things which
are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
Eternal as compared with temporary! Do we often realize sufficiently
what that comparison means? What is the longest life here? Call it
one hundred years, and what is that compared with life eternal,
everlasting, never ending? That is the ultimate reality with which we
are all concerned. Our hearts are filled, first, with the thoughts of
youth, then with those of manhood, then with those of old age; but
there lies before us, before each one of us, an interminable existence,
in which we are destined to experience profounder happiness, or
profounder unhappiness, than any we have experienced here. All that has
exercised our thoughts and feelings here will indeed leave its mark
upon us, but it will all pass away; it is essentially temporal, and
there lies before us an unending existence for weal or woe.
So far, therefore, as any individual life is concerned, so far as
those young lives are concerned, whose premature loss is so bitter to
their nearest and dearest, and seems so sad to all of us, it is well
we should clearly realize that to the individual life itself, a few
years more or less--nay, half a life-time more or less--is practically
insignificant. Are there fifty, or forty, or thirty years behind it?
There is all eternity in front of it. There is a fulness of life and
joy, and even glory, before it, which can never end. To one who has
lived, and who dies, in the true faith and love of Christ, all the
gracious and glorious promises of our Lord and His Apostles are fully
assured; and even if, in any particular case, we may not have the
full evidence of that entire Christian devotion, we may surely apply
to every life which is willingly sacrificed at the call of duty, for a
righteous cause, and with a generous self-surrender, the assurance of
St. Paul, that God will render “to every man according to his deeds.
To them who by patience in well-doing seek for glory, honour, and
immortality, eternal life”; or, as he says again, “Glory, honour, and
peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first and also to the
Gentile.” Or, as we may surely paraphrase it, to the Christian first,
and also to every human soul. If, in fact, our vision were merely
confined to this world, and we did but catch a doubtful glimpse of
what is beyond it, the spectacle of the sacrifice of human life, and
particularly of young human life in a war like this, would be scarcely
endurable. But let us have, not merely that “gleam beyond it,” of which
the Christian poet speaks, but that clear vision beyond it, of an
eternal life of which our Saviour assures us, and of “the grace of the
Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy
Ghost,” in the peace of which that eternal life will be spent, and we
may be able to feel, like St. Paul, that the affliction of the moment
is light, in comparison with the eternal abundance of glory which
awaits the soul in the future.
We are too apt, in a word, to take our stand within the horizon of
this life, and to judge of all things as they are reflected in this
world’s mirror; but if we would see them in their true perspective and
so measure their real values, we must take our stand in the life beyond
the grave. We must look, not at the things which are seen, but at the
things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal,
but the things which are not seen are eternal. In some degree, though
not to the same extent, we may apply a similar consideration to the
sufferings of nations, and of the world as a whole, in a great war. It
is revealed to us in the Book of the Revelation of St. John that, at
the consummation of all things, after scenes of carnage which are at
least equal in their horror to the dreadful spectacle now before our
eyes, a new heaven and a new earth will be created, by Him Who sits
upon the throne making all things new. Even so far as the present
world is concerned, the sufferings and sacrifices involved in great
wars have doubtless won for future generations the greatest blessings
of true Christian civilization--liberty, order, peace, and justice.
It might, indeed, be thought that the price of such blessings was too
high, if we judged of the sacrifices of individual lives in the light
only of the things that are seen; but when we can feel that every
life thus sacrificed, that every suffering thus unselfishly endured,
works out for the sufferer himself an exceeding and eternal reward,
we can look to the things which are not seen, and can again realize
that, in comparison with them, it is not too much to speak, with St.
Paul, of “our light affliction which is but for a moment.” That is the
grand comfort, also, of the mourners who are left behind, who may be
similarly assured that, in their patient acceptance of their bitter
share of these sacrifices, they will be united with those they have
loved and lost, in the eternal blessedness to which St. Paul looks
forward.
But who does not realize that we need very strong evidence, and the
firmest assurances, to sustain flesh and blood amid such bitter trials
as men and women are now experiencing--fathers and mothers, wives and
sisters, lovers and friends? It is not, perhaps, even a St. Paul whose
word alone would be sufficient to bear that strain. If we had only that
to depend on we could but speak of hope and trust; we could hardly say,
as he goes on to say, that “we know” that if our earthly house of this
tabernacle be dissolved we have a building of God, a house eternal
in the heavens. But the ground of his knowledge was the reality of
our Lord’s resurrection, and the assurances which our Lord, when so
raised, had given him. We know, he says, “that He Who raised up the
Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus.” The great certainty from
which St. Paul’s Gospel starts is that our Lord, Who had undoubtedly
suffered death in its most agonizing form, had not less undoubtedly
risen from the dead, and appeared again and again to St. Paul, as to
many others, and had given him the personal assurances on which we are
invited to rely. That is the cardinal fact of the Christian Faith. Had
our Saviour not risen, had He not appeared in such a form as to prove
that He had completely overcome death, then we should still, at the
best, have been in the region of hopes and imperfect beliefs, and of a
yearning trust. We could not have said, with the Apostle, that we know
that Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them
that slept. But now it is no mere prophet or Apostle, but the risen
Saviour Himself, Who stands in the midst of human life, as He stood in
the midst of His disciples on the morrow of His resurrection, and Who
said Himself, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth on
Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and
believeth in Me shall never die.” Those were His own words; that is the
conviction He stamped upon the mind and heart of such men as St. Paul,
St. Peter, and St. John; and that is the sure foundation on which we
stand in believing that, if we suffer and die with Christ, we shall
also live with Him.
Let me only add that this blessed revelation can only bring its full
blessing and comfort in proportion as we realize, for our own souls,
and for all who are dear to us, that union with Christ in spirit which
is essential to our union with Him in life, here and hereafter. “If
any man,” says St. Paul, “have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of
His.” There are, no doubt, degrees in which men can possess that spirit
of Christ; and even if we possess it in but a feeble degree, we may
humbly trust that He will not disown it, and that He will grant us some
portion of His grace and of His life. But if this eternal life, this
life of abundant glory, is open to us all provided we are in union with
Him, which of us will not be moved by the afflictions of the present,
and the eternal promise of the future, to seek for ever closer union
with that Lord of Life, looking less and less at the things that are
seen, and more and more at the things that are not seen, and knowing
that our life is hid with Christ in God?
THE EASTER MESSAGE.
PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, EASTER DAY, 1916.
“_If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above,
where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on
things above, not on things on the earth, for ye are dead, and your
life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, Who is our life, shall
appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory._”--Col. iii. 1-4.
Easter Day brings us the most blessed message that could possibly be
proclaimed at any time; but at present it is perhaps more blessed and
more appropriate than at any other time in our experience. It tells
us, in the first place, that Christ was raised from the dead after His
crucifixion, and now sits at the right hand of God, Who has highly
exalted Him, and given Him a name that is above every name. But it
tells us, also, that the blessedness of that resurrection is open to
all of us, and that we are admitted to share in the glory which Christ
won for Himself; so that when Christ, Who is our life, shall appear
we also shall appear with Him in glory. If we appreciate what these
assurances mean, we shall be lifted up by them into the apprehension
of realities which transform our whole life in this world, and enable
us to look beyond it, to an eternal existence of the highest spiritual
bliss hereafter.
There are two ways in which men may think of their position in life.
The realities of this life may be predominant in their thoughts, so
as almost to absorb their whole minds. That, I fear, is the natural
tendency of most of us. The claim which the things of this world make
upon us is so incessant, and often so intense, that we have too often
neither the energy nor the inclination to look beyond it. There have,
indeed, been good and brave men, who have said that we should not look
beyond it; that we should concentrate all our energies on the work
and the duties imposed upon us, and leave the future to take care
of itself, even though it be that vast, and, as we believe, eternal
future, on which we shall enter at death. That was necessarily the
attitude of good men before the revelation of the Gospel. There have
been, unhappily, some good men among us in recent times who practically
live a similar life, not realizing or believing the truths that are
opened to them by the Gospel, but content to do their duty to the best
of their power. I fear a similar life is practically lived by too many
Christians. Their interest and their thoughts are mainly absorbed in
this present visible world, in their duties, their pleasures, and their
worldly happiness; and they do not, for the most part, think of much
beyond. One consequence of this attitude of mind is that they judge of
all occurrences by their effect on this life; and particularly they
are apt to consider all the dispensations of God’s providence, all
His judgments and all His mercies, with reference to their effect on
this world. How is it possible, for instance, they ask, that a God of
perfect goodness and love can permit such an awful dispensation to
fall upon men as a great war like the present, that He can allow the
sufferings, and the bereavements, and the miseries which such a war
involves? I think, if we are candid with ourselves, we shall find that
when that question is acutely felt, it is practically with reference
to this life that it is urged. Why should there be all this suffering
in the world in which we are now living? Why should so many young and
precious lives be sacrificed? Why should so many homes be darkened, and
so many hearts all but broken, in this present time? It is the present
suffering and the present time that are uppermost in our thoughts. We
are apt to speak and think as if the life in the present world of those
who are lost had been the matter of greatest consequence for them,
and as if we were without any positive compensation, to them and to
ourselves, except the victory of the cause for which they laid down
their lives.
Now the great blessing of the Easter message is that it entirely
reverses this aspect of life. It reveals to us, on the assurance of
Christ and His Apostles, that this world and this life are a very small
thing indeed compared with the realities which Christ has revealed
to us by His resurrection. He has revealed to us, first for Himself
and in His own person, and secondly for ourselves, that the world in
which we really live is an eternal and spiritual realm, in which we
are privileged to be in the company of Christ Himself, and of all the
souls who, from the commencement of the world, have lived and died in
harmony with the spirit of Christ and the will of God. That is the
real life into which every one in this congregation is admitted, if
he will. One of those great men in the past, to whom I have referred,
imagined the case of men having lived all their lives in a cave to
which only broken beams of sunlight penetrated, and who had no idea of
the splendid vision of the sun, and of the earth with all its beauties,
which would burst upon their vision the moment they stepped outside
their cave. That, as his marvellous wisdom perceived, is the case of
too many among us, even among Christians. We have our caves, created by
the temporal interests and obligations around us; and broken gleams,
from the truths of the Gospel which we imperfectly realize, afford
a dim religious light to our condition. But, in reality, there is a
spiritual, a glorious, and an eternal world around us, which will burst
upon us with overpowering splendour when, after death, we step out of
the cave of this flesh. The problems of God’s dispensations, both to
the world at large and to ourselves, are beyond our comprehension and
solution, because they have reference not merely to this world, in
which most of us live for no more than three score years and ten, but
to that eternal and infinite world of spirits, which will endure for
ever, and which is beyond our ken. To each individual soul, young or
old, the question of chief importance is not what happens to them in
this world, whether their life be short or long, whether it be a happy
life or a sad one, but what happens to them afterwards, in that eternal
career, which opens to them all at death. The only true Christian
attitude, as the Apostle says elsewhere, is to “look not at the things
which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, for the things
which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are
eternal.”
But what are these things that are eternal? That is one of the most
precious parts of the Christian revelation. In some respects, of
course, they must remain unknown to us while we are in the flesh, for
“eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart
of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”
But though we do not know what the external circumstances of that life
will be, we do know, because Christ Himself, and His Apostles on His
authority, have revealed it to us, what the essential part of them will
be so far as our spiritual nature is concerned. They will be simply
and precisely the spiritual things which are the highest and best in
this world. They will be perfect truth, and peace, and love, and, in a
word, all those graces and perfections which were manifested in Christ
Himself. The Apostle bids us “seek those things that are above, where
Christ sitteth on the right hand of God”; and then he proceeds to
explain what those things are. “Put on,” he says, a few verses further,
“as the elect of God a heart of compassion, kindness, humility,
meekness, long suffering; forbearing one another, and forgiving one
another; ... even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye; and above all
these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfectness ... and
whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus,
giving thanks to God the Father through Him.” That is the character of
the future world, the future society, to which we have the privilege of
being admitted at death: a world in which all the graces and glories
of the Christian character exist, without any of the imperfections by
which even the holiest lives are clouded here; a world of perpetual
thanksgiving to God the Father for the love with which He has loved us;
a world in short which is ablaze with the light and warmth of all love
and truth.
One blessed consequence from this revelation of the nature of the
spiritual world, in which the risen Christ reigns, is that we can enter
it, and live for it, even in the present life, without any disregard
of the obligatory claims which this world has upon us. However busy a
man’s life, however absorbed he may necessarily be in the requirements
and duties of his daily occupations, he can also be exerting his
energies of thankfulness and prayer to God, of truth and love and
compassion and meekness and peace, which make the life of the eternal
world. There is no occupation or condition of life in which those
blessed graces may not be exerted and cultivated; and men and women
may thus live in the spirit and light Of Heaven, even while they are
confined within the cave of the flesh. In proportion as they are living
in this light even here, they are being prepared for the eternal Heaven
of the future; they are fulfilling, all the more completely, their duty
to the society and the life of this world because they are guided by
the illumination, both of the present Heaven which overshadows their
souls, and of the future Heaven, of which the approaching gleams throw
flashes of light across their path.
But what I would more particularly ask, at the present moment, amid
the strain and distress of these months and years of war, is whether
the promise of this eternal blessedness, the vision of this unseen
and eternal world, does not justify the Apostle’s description of all
the sorrows and sufferings which he and his fellows underwent, as
“our light affliction, which is but for a moment.” If this world were
the main scene of our life and of our hopes, there would be something
appalling in the destruction, or mutilation, of so many of the best
lives among us, and the cruel bereavement of those who are left
behind. But in the light of this revelation, is it not our privilege
to regard it all as “a light affliction, which is but for a moment,”
and which is working for us all, for those who are taken and for those
who are left, a far more exceeding and eternal glory? What does it
matter to a life, however young and bright, that it should be cut short
in this world if, through death in the discharge of duty, it passes
to the full enjoyment of those “things that are with Christ,” in that
world where Christ will welcome it with the greeting: “Well done, good
and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?” It is,
indeed, a hard fate for those whose life in this world is, for the
future, maimed by injuries, or marred by bereavement. But for them,
too, there is the assurance of Christ that if they suffer with Him, and
in sympathy with Him, they shall also be glorified together, and that
all they suffer, in obedience to His will here, will help them forward
in the way that leads to everlasting life. These are not mere human
hopes and imaginings; they are the express promises and assurances of
the Lord, Who suffered and died upon the Cross, and of those Apostles,
whom He commissioned to bring His message to the world. This Heaven,
of the present and the future, has been constituted by them the great
reality, the greatest of all realities, the supreme reality, of our
lives, here and hereafter; and in proportion as we look at everything
here in the light of it, the sorrows and sacrifices of this life are
reduced to comparatively small proportions, and the hope and the
blessings of the eternal life become the great Heaven, the glorious
vault of God’s light and love by which we are surrounded.
It is thus that Easter Day brings home to us a message which satisfies
the deepest cravings and necessities of life, and affords a practical
solution of the difficulties which, without such a revelation, are
involved in the miseries of war. War itself, indeed, points to some
such solution, and compels men in practice to embrace it. It has been
said that war is the greatest of educators, and there are various
senses in which this is true. It educates, it exercises, it manifests,
as nothing else does, some of the highest excellences of human nature:
self-sacrifice, endurance, mutual devotion, faith and loyalty, and,
in Tennyson’s pregnant phrase, “all that makes a man.” But perhaps its
greatest educative influence consists in the fact that it compels men
to act, without hesitation, on the instinct, which God has implanted
in their hearts, that nothing in this world is of any importance in
comparison with the maintenance and the assertion of righteousness,
truth, justice, and mercy. The mass of a people may be living in
comfort and luxury, with their minds and affections mainly engaged in
the energies, the pleasures, and the interests of this life; but as
soon as some great challenge is offered to those supreme principles
of righteousness and mercy, on which the whole fabric of true human
life depends, their hearts spring up with an instinct that everything
they value in this world must be sacrificed in defence of those moral
and spiritual causes. The moment the note is struck of a great war
for righteousness, like the present, that moment men and women feel
compelled, by their very nature, to “set their affection on the things
above,” not on the things of this world; they realize, that to this
world they must become practically dead, and live for those high
moral and spiritual causes which are the supreme treasures of mankind,
and that, in this sense at all events, their “life is hid with Christ
in God.” If, as we may confidently say, we are warring for right and
truth, and for the maintenance of the will of God among men, we may
then apply even to the war itself, and all the national and individual
sacrifices it entails, the thankful conviction of the Apostle that
“our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far
more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” It is working out for our
nation and Empire, and for the world at large, the establishment on
a firmer basis than ever of true Christian civilization. Those whose
lives are sacrificed are but brought by death into the nearer presence
of Christ, where His love and His mercy, no less than His justice, will
be still more to them than in the world they leave; and those who are
left behind may learn to prize the privilege of suffering with their
Saviour, that they may in time be glorified with Him.
THE NEED AND THE MEANS OF RIGHT JUDGMENT.
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, WHIT SUNDAY, 1915.
“_The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in
My Name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your
remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you._”--St. John xiv. 26.
Never in our time, perhaps never in the history of the world, has there
been such urgent occasion as there is to-day for joining with all
our hearts, in the prayer of the Whit Sunday Collect, that God will
grant us, by the help of His Spirit, “to have a right judgment in all
things.” We have before our eyes the most tremendous illustration ever
afforded of the awful consequences which may ensue from the absence of
such a right judgment, and the prevalence of a wrong judgment. In the
first place, the war itself is entirely due to the exercise of a wrong
judgment by some person or persons. Nothing but a great misjudgment, on
one side or the other, of the circumstances which occasioned the war,
or of its consequences, could have precipitated all the nations of
Europe into such a deadly and disastrous conflict.
Every statesman, of course, thinks that some other statesman has
blundered, but the mutual recriminations form at least a general
confession of wrong judgment somewhere. When we see such wrong judgment
possible among the ablest and most powerful men in Europe, in a
matter which involves the sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives,
the desolation of thousands of homes, and the devastation of some
of the fairest countries in Europe, have we not need to cry to God,
with the most intense earnestness, that He will grant to us, and to
all who act for us and with us, the help of His Spirit to give us a
right judgment in all things? This gift of a right judgment may seem,
perhaps, in ordinary times, a comparatively small matter to be treated
as the culminating blessing won for us by the Death and Resurrection
and Ascension of our Lord. This is the final festival of the series
which commemorates the great events of His Life; for Trinity Sunday,
which follows, does but sum up the whole substance of the Christian
revelation, as that of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The Whit Sunday
Collect embodies the final craving of the Christian life, for those
gifts which, on our Lord’s Ascension, He became empowered to bestow
upon His Church. But we may appreciate, at this time, better than ever
before, why all those gifts are summed up in the prayer that we may be
granted a right judgment in all things. Upon that right judgment in
the leaders of the Christian nations depends the peace of the whole
world, and the possibility of ourselves leading a peaceable life in all
godliness and honesty. It is demonstrated, by the most awful example
ever given, that all the wisdom, all the experience, all the knowledge
of human nature, accumulated for twenty centuries, are insufficient, of
themselves, to ensure that right judgment; and we are driven to-day to
act upon the exhortation of St. James, “If any man lack wisdom, let him
ask of God” and “it shall be given him.”
But this failure of good judgment in the political management of the
world is not the only, nor the most terrible, exhibition which is
afforded at the present time of the grievous liability of human nature
to form wrong judgments. The worst and most distressing exhibition of
all is seen in the moral perversion of one of the greatest of European
nations. Unless our own judgment is absolutely perverted, Germany has
become possessed by an utterly false, un-Christian, and even inhuman
judgment in moral conduct. The case was justly summed up in a letter
published the other day by an eminent member of our Church, the Dean of
Exeter--“Women outraged, treaties broken, inoffensive citizens, women
and babes, murdered wholesale by land and sea, wells poisoned, deadly
gases taking the place of manly conflict, Houses of God ruthlessly
destroyed, fair lands desolated, noble cities destroyed without
provocation, without reasonable object or purpose, the world filled
with abominable lies, the hymn of hate chosen as a national anthem, and
a baleful curse placed, as a nation’s prayer, on the lips of children,
and placarded in the streets, a fit sequel to the hymn of hate”--this
is the moral and religious spectacle which Germany now exhibits, and
its rulers and guides not only allow these things to be done, but have
pleasure in them that do them. It is not merely that these un-Christian
and inhuman things are done, but that they are justified, that they are
treated as lawful and meritorious, that the spirit which promotes them
is recognized and applauded as the right spirit--this is the amazing
and appalling exhibition of wrong judgment which Germany now offers to
the world.
Let us, moreover, if we would duly appreciate the lesson to be derived
from such a spectacle, bear in mind the character and capacities of the
nation by which it is exhibited. We should bear in mind that Germany
is probably the most highly educated country in Europe; its science,
its literature, its arts, its industry have been among the finest
that the world has seen. In religion it gave Europe the Reformation;
and the great Protestant nations of the world, alike in Europe and
America, recognize the immense spiritual debt they have owed to it in
the past. Our own theological literature, during the last century,
has acknowledged an immense debt to it, and German scholars have, in
our own time, been in the front rank of the learning of the world. It
is a country which was proud of its culture, and, in such matters as
I have mentioned, with full justice. No thoughtful man can treat the
Germans, as a nation, as inferior to any other in Europe, in all the
externals of such culture. All the achievements of past history, all
the acquisitions of Christian civilisation, lay open before them, as
much as before ourselves, and they are bound to us by intimate ties of
blood and of common interests. It is a nation, in short, with every
equipment which human intellect, and art, and Nature can bestow; and
yet, notwithstanding all this, the nation, as a whole, has formed a
judgment so false and inhuman, on the very elements of moral duty, that
we are forced to recognize that in fighting it we are fighting not
merely a political foe, but a moral outlaw from Christian civilisation.
If such an awful perversion of judgment is possible, have we not
reason to tremble at the possibilities of human error? The horrors I
have recalled are a disgrace to Germany; but let us not disguise from
ourselves the lamentable fact that they are also a disgrace to human
nature. To this, we must realize, human nature can come, in spite of
literature, and science, and art, and the traditions of generations,
and profound religious capacities. One cannot divide the Germans from
all other human races, or even from ourselves, and say that they have
a human nature of their own. It is our common human nature which, in
this case, has succumbed to such a degraded judgment, and which has
become false to the inherited principles of Christian civilization.
What we ought to learn from so distressing a spectacle is the absolute
need of some influence higher than any that mere human nature, when
left to itself, can exert, if the moral judgment, the moral sense, the
moral character of nations and races, and of ourselves among them,
are to be kept true to the ideals towards which human nature, at its
best, has always been striving, and which our Lord Jesus Christ has
revealed as the eternal standard established by God. I am afraid
there can be no doubt respecting one cause, at all events, of this
terrible degradation. For the last generation or two, in consequence
of the prevalence in Germany of a false philosophy and an extravagant
criticism, the minds of the educated classes in that country have
been imbued with a complete distrust of the Scriptures, and of the
revelation of God in Christ; and, in consequence, they have abandoned
all deference to the authority of God’s Word and the example and
teaching of our Lord. I believe, indeed, that faith in God and God’s
Word, and love of Christ, still subsist in much of their old intensity
among the simpler classes of the German nation--among numbers to whom
the name and the teaching of Luther are still a venerated influence.
But they have ceased to mould the character and guide the thoughts of
the educated classes, and the consequence is that human nature has
broken loose from all control, and has abandoned itself to an unbridled
lust of power and of earthly pleasure.
It is painful to contemplate such a spectacle, and to recall it to
you; but it is necessary we should realize what it means, if we are
to learn the lesson which is the most imperative for us at this
moment, and if we are to take home to our minds the full blessing of
the promise of Whit Sunday. It is encouraging to bear in mind that a
similar spectacle and crisis existed in the world at the time when our
Lord spoke the words of the text. The Roman Empire, although, like the
German nation, it rendered great services to mankind, was in His day
developing into a terrible despotism, and its rulers were becoming
the incarnation of a ruthless and unscrupulous force. The age of the
twelve Cæsars, some of whom were monsters of violence and vice, was
commencing; and at that moment there appeared another influence, that
of the twelve Apostles, who proclaimed in the world the authority and
the inspiration of another King, their Lord and Master, who taught
the blessedness of another ideal--the ideal of poverty of spirit, of
mourning, of meekness, of mercy, of purity, and of peacemaking. The
two ideals struggled side by side for three centuries; but the spirit
of violence proved unable to crush the spirit of meekness, and had at
last to acknowledge its superiority, and to submit, in great degree, at
all events, to the authority and example of our Lord. The mostly highly
organized physical force that the world at that day had ever seen was
slowly but surely undermined by the spirit of Christian meekness and
love; and from that moment Christian principles of conduct extended
their authority more and more over the whole range of worldly life,
and even over the fierce passions and struggles of war. Gradually
there became established those principles of chivalry under which, as
our great philosophical statesman described it, there prevailed “that
sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain
like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity,
which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost
half its evil by losing all its grossness.” That great amelioration of
human passion and of human evil was won by the persistent contemplation
and assertion of the authority and example of our Lord, and by the
perpetual inculcation of the teaching of His Apostles. The Spirit
of God, descending as on this great day, inspired Evangelists and
Apostles to write those Gospels in which the Person, the teaching,
and the example of our Saviour are so marvellously depicted, and
those Epistles in which they are brought home to our hearts with such
touching force. The same Spirit was vouchsafed to the great teachers
and leaders of the Church, and quickened in the hearts of the people
at large the gracious seed which was thus sown. If the new embodiment
of the rule of force in human affairs is to be effectually overcome,
it can only be by the same means. It cannot be done by our arms alone.
Force alone is no remedy for force. The Spirit of Christ as it lives in
the Books of the New Testament, must again make its appeal to the minds
and consciences of the nations of Europe; and the Spirit of God, acting
through those examples and exhortations, must bring home to us, once
more, the life and love of Christ, must open men’s hearts to receive
His image, and so enable them once more to have a right judgment in all
things.
The prayer of the Collect, therefore, should turn our hearts and minds,
at this juncture, to the supreme necessity, if we would save ourselves
from the dangers of wrong judgment, and if, according to a famous
saying, we would “save Europe by our example,” of submitting our
hearts and lives with the deepest earnestness to the ideals set before
us in the Scriptures, and especially in the teaching and example of
our Lord and His Apostles, as the only sufficient means of maintaining
a right judgment among us on the great moral problems of life. As a
nation we have hitherto enjoyed unique advantages in this respect. To
no other nation in the world has it ever been given to have the Word
of God, the whole Word of God, read aloud in our churches, Sunday by
Sunday, for more than three hundred years; and to have thus had the
words and deeds of Christ, and the exhortations of His Apostles, and
the devotions of Psalmists and Prophets, impressed upon our minds
week by week, and sometimes day by day, until much of them has become
the most familiar of all the records of our memories. There has been
another means, moreover, especially in Scotland, but in England also,
by which we have been kept in constant touch with the same influence,
and that is the custom, which generally prevailed till recently, of
Family Prayer, and the reading of the Holy Scriptures in the family
circle. By these means that Divine Seed was sown in the hearts of young
and old, and it could not but produce much fruit. If we desire to
preserve the Christian instincts, which can alone protect us against
such dreadful relapses into a world of violence and ungoverned passion
as human nature has been proved capable of, let us submit ourselves
with renewed earnestness to those Divine Words, and to that Christian
discipline, which have maintained for so long, in this country, the
character of Christian gentlemen and gentlewomen, and have upheld among
us, in spite of our many faults and failures, at all events the main
principles of a right judgment. When our Lord says, in the text, that
His Spirit would bring all things to the remembrance of the Apostles,
whatsoever He had said unto them, He gave a promise which was in the
first instance fulfilled, as I have said, in the writings of the
Evangelists and the Apostles, but to which it is also the privilege
of every Christian to appeal. If we will read His Scriptures, He will
open our minds to understand them, He will bring home to us, by His
fellowship, the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God; He
will save us from false judgments of all kinds; and will enable us to
uphold in our own hearts, and in the world at large, that truth and
love, that meekness, gentleness, and humility, for the protection of
which we are now appealing to the arbitrament of battles, and of the
God of battles. May He grant us victory in that appeal; and when it
has been granted to us, let us strive to render the victory secure by
living more devoutly in His faith and fear, and seeking more diligently
the Grace of His Holy Spirit.
THE ADVENT MESSAGE AND THE WAR.
IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, NOV. 29, 1914.
“_Because He hath appointed a day, in which He will judge the world in
righteousness by that Man Whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given
assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead._”
The season of Advent, with which the Church’s year reopens brings to
us a message of peculiar appropriateness and encouragement at the
present moment. It does so because it lays the corner-stone of the
grand edifice of the Gospel, or the good news of God, of which we
shall follow the construction through the Church’s year. What is the
special message of Advent? It is the message of that grand verse in the
Psalms, “Righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” It
proclaims to us the message of the prophets, opened to us in triumphant
tones by the prophet Isaiah in the Lesson of to-day, that righteousness
is the very foundation on which God is building up society; that it
is the very root from which our own lives and the life of our nation
derive their existence; that it was to promote this righteousness that
our Lord came into the world at His first Advent in great humility;
and that it is to establish that righteousness finally that He will
come again in great glory to judge the quick and the dead. This is the
beginning of God’s revelation to us, and it is also the end and the
culmination of His revelation. It is the beginning of the Gospel, and
it is also the end of the Gospel.
If we would understand the blessing of the Gospel, we must begin
with the conviction that the one great object for which this whole
dispensation of human society exists is that complete righteousness,
the glory of the Divine righteousness, may be established in it, and
that nothing but this can promote either the glory of God or the
happiness of man. Read the Psalms with this consideration in your mind,
and I think you will be deeply impressed with the fact that every
prayer to God embodies a prayer for the establishment of right against
wrong; so that the Psalmist only dares to pray for himself so far as
the deliverances and successes he prays for are in harmony with the
righteous will and purposes of God. Every prayer is in the spirit of
the exquisite Psalm of this evening: “Deliver me, O Lord, from mine
enemies: for I flee unto Thee to hide me. Teach me to do the thing that
pleaseth Thee, for Thou art my God: let Thy loving spirit lead me forth
into the land of righteousness.” We have no right to ask or expect help
on any other condition than that; for the one supreme work which God is
working day by day, and year by year, and century by century, is the
realization in human life of what that righteousness and judgment are,
which are the foundation of His throne.
Advent reminds us, in the first place, of this grand and simple fact,
and bids us make it the starting point of all our Christian thought
and hope; but it gives us the further assurance that God is not
only carrying forward that work of righteousness now, but that He
will complete it hereafter. It repeats that message which St. Paul
proclaimed to the world at large, through the Athenians, that “God hath
appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness
by that Man Whom He hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance
unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead.” That was
the culmination of St. Paul’s Gospel to the people of Athens. That
is the culmination of the message of the Gospel to ourselves at the
present day. What do we need more than all at this moment? What are our
minds full of but the dreadful spectacle before us of the whole earth
filled with violence, of an awful outbreak of hatred, unrighteousness,
injustice, wanton cruelty, and barbarity? The words of Isaiah read
this morning are exactly applicable to the spectacle of Belgium and
France at this moment: “Your country is desolate; your cities are
burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence,
and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of
Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of
cucumbers, as a besieged city.” Might not our hearts almost fail us
as we contemplate such a volcanic eruption of injustice and violence
after nineteen centuries of Christianity? But our hearts will not fail
us, any more than the heart of Isaiah failed him in his day. And why?
Because of this assurance--an assurance deep down in our souls--that
this unrighteousness cannot prevail. That conviction lies very deep in
human nature, even apart from God’s revelation in the Psalms and the
Gospel. But by this revelation it is given an irrefragable strength,
and we grasp with the deepest conviction the assurance of the Psalmist:
“Let the floods clap their hands, and let the hills be joyful together
before the Lord, for He is come to judge the earth, with righteousness
to judge the world, and the people with His truth.” That is the message
of Advent, and there never was a time in history when we could grasp it
more thankfully with all our hearts and souls.
There is something inexpressibly elevating and inspiring in this
message of a future judgment and of the final vindication of
righteousness, as it enables us to look beyond this present scene
of distress and trouble, to realize that all that is passing around
us is in reality only part of a far larger and grander scene, and
that the events of the hour are but a brief passage in a universal
history, which has been carried forward for centuries under God’s
hand, and is being worked out under His guidance to a glorious and
righteous conclusion. If you allow your gaze and your thoughts to be
fixed mainly on your own lives, on the lives of your own generation,
or even of our own national history, you may well be distressed and
perplexed at the apparent defeat of righteous causes and purposes, at
the overthrow of the laborious work of years of peace, at what seems
like the destruction of those bonds of human society to which prophets
and saints and soldiers and statesmen had devoted their labours and
their very lives for generations. So it seemed to Isaiah in his day;
so it seemed to Habakkuk when he exclaimed, “that judgment doth never
go forth.” So it has seemed to many a devoted servant of God and man,
if he trusted only to his own eyes, from generation to generation.
Nothing but prophecy, the prophecy of the Old and New Testaments,
is, in fact, adequate to the strain thus put upon men and women by
these experiences. But only believe, as the prophets assure you, only
believe as our Saviour declared, and as His Apostles proclaimed
by His commission, that it is but part of one great history, one
great universal dispensation, in which God is steadily ensuring, by
whatever means may in His Divine wisdom be necessary, the supremacy of
righteousness and the overthrow of evil, and you can then live through
it, and struggle through it, not merely with the patience, but with the
exultation, which marked the Jewish prophets and psalmists. Belgium and
Northern France are now passing through the very experiences, to the
letter, which Isaiah described in the case of the people of Israel in
his day; but Isaiah looked through all these distresses to a time when
“the Lord’s House should be established in the top of the mountains and
should be exalted above the hills, and all nations should flow into
it”; when “out of Zion should go forth the law, and the word of the
Lord from Jerusalem”; when “He should judge the nations, and should
rebuke many peoples, and should beat their swords into ploughshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks, when nation should not lift up
sword against nation, neither should they learn war any more.” That
was Isaiah’s assurance, even in the dark days he describes. We have
a hundred-fold more ground for the same assurance when it has been
proclaimed to us by our Lord Himself, and sealed with His blood, and
countersigned with the assurance and the blood of His Apostles and
Saints.
Even from this general point of view, the message of Advent comes to us
with a supremely inspiring force in the crisis of our great national
struggle, but it has other aspects of profound grace and comfort as
well as of warning. The most gracious, perhaps, of all its aspects is
the assurance it gives us that the final judgment of the world, the
final establishment of righteousness, the final reward of the good,
will be in the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ. This, of course, is a
matter of faith, based on positive revelation, resting on the personal
assurance of our Lord and His Apostles. It is no matter of speculation,
no matter of opinion, but a positive statement of fact, which is one of
the corner-stones of the Christian religion. There is too much tendency
at present to resolve that religion into matters of mere human
thought and feeling and hope, and to make its acceptance depend on its
conformity to modern ideas; but there is no possibility of treating in
that manner such a point of definite, momentous, fundamental fact as
that our Lord Jesus Christ has been appointed by God to be the Judge of
quick and dead, to sum up the whole world’s destiny, and to assign to
each one of us, to every one in this congregation, his place hereafter
in the Kingdom of God or outside it. The office of judge, even in this
world, is a solemn one. How infinitely awful is the position of the
Eternal Judge of all! Now the substance of the revelation of Advent
is that this great office is not veiled, as it was to the Jews, and
as it must needs be, without revelation, to all the world, in the
mysterious, distant, and dread form of the absolute majesty of God
Himself; but that it is formally delegated to One Who is not only the
Son of God, but the Son of Man, to the Lord Jesus Christ, Who took our
flesh and blood upon Him, Who died for us and rose again. “God hath
appointed a day,” St. Paul says, “in the which He will judge the world
in righteousness by _that man_ Whom He hath ordained ... Whom He
raised from the dead.” The grace which is involved in this declaration
is so infinite that I hesitate to speak freely of it in my own words,
and I am thankful to be able to express it in language of one of the
most authoritative of all divines, our own Bishop Pearson, in his grave
and deliberate _Exposition of the Creed_. “If,” he says (page 305),
“we look upon the judgment to come only as revealing our secrets, as
discerning our actions, as sentencing our persons, according to the
works done in the flesh, there is not one of us can expect life from
that tribunal at the last day.... It is necessary, therefore, that
we should believe that _Christ_ shall sit upon the throne, that our
Redeemer shall be our Judge, that we shall receive our sentence, not
according to the rigour of the law, but the mildness and mercies of
the Gospel; and then we may look not only upon the precepts, but also
upon the promises of God. Whatsoever sentence in the sacred Scriptures
speaketh anything of hope, whatsoever text administereth any comfort,
whatsoever argument drawn from thence can breed in us any assurance,
we can confidently make use of them all in reference to the judgment
to come; because by that Gospel which contains them all we shall be
judged. If we consider Whose Gospel it is, and Who shall judge us by
it, ‘_we are the members of His Body, of His Flesh, and of His Bones;
for which cause He is not ashamed to call us brethren_.’ As one of our
brethren He hath redeemed us, He hath laid down His life as a ransom
for us.... Well, therefore, may ‘_we have boldness and access with
confidence_,’ by the faith of Him unto the throne of that Judge, Who is
our brother, Who is our Redeemer, Who is our High Priest, Who is our
Advocate, Who will not by His word at the last day condemn us, because
He hath already by the same word absolved us, saying, ‘_Verily, verily,
I say unto you, he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent
Me hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation, but is
passed from death into life_.’”
At a time when death is all around us, when so many of our nearest and
dearest and best may pass at any moment through the shadow of death to
the judgment which is beyond, it is of infinite comfort to be assured
by this Divine message that they pass, not to a severe tribunal which
will judge them by the letter of the law, and by a strict estimate
of their faults, but to this gracious and merciful throne of their
Brother, their Advocate, and their Redeemer, Who will judge them with
infinite mercy and equity. I do not hesitate to say that He will judge
them with peculiar sympathy, because they have died in the very cause
in which He died Himself, and which it is His office as a judge to
maintain--the cause of righteousness. In the ancient Church, martyrdom
was regarded as ensuring remission of sins and absolution. Soldiers, no
doubt, would feel that it would be putting their case too high to place
their sacrifice of their lives in the cause of their King and country,
in a war like this, on quite the same level as the heroic martyrdom of
the great Saints of old. But it is a sacrifice of the same nature. It
is coloured by the virtue of the sacrifice of Christ Himself, and of
His followers; and we may confidently be assured that those who meet
their death on the battlefields of this war in the spirit of faith in
Christ, and in simple devotion to duty, will be received by Him in the
sense of those gracious words, “Well done, good and faithful servant,”
and may hope to be admitted in some degree into the joy of their Lord.
According to the judgment of the ancient Church, and the greatest of
our own Divines, we may confidently bear the memories of them in our
prayers before that Throne of gracious judgment--not presuming to know,
or desiring to know, more than this, that they are in the hands of One
Who is at once a Judge and a Saviour, and trusting that, in praying
for His gracious and merciful reception of them, we are but giving
expression to the yearnings of His own Divine and Human Heart.
Such are some of the blessed assurances which the Advent Season brings
us, and we cannot be too thankful for them in our present time of
distress. But it brings us one lesson of warning, which it is equally
important for us to bear in mind. A war like this is undoubtedly a
judgment. It springs from the sins of men, from their passions and
their lusts, their lack of love, their unrighteousnesses of various
kinds. War shows us death, and all that is involved in death, as
the natural consequence of human passions, when not controlled by
the spirit of Christ and the Will of God. “When lust hath conceived
it bringeth forth sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth
death.” That is the law of Nature. It applies more or less to all
who are engaged in war, and we, in this war, must not shrink from
acknowledging our part in the accumulation of human wrong which has,
at length, exploded into this scene of violence and misery. Advent,
therefore, bids us look into our own hearts and lives, and ask
ourselves what there has been in them which is not in conformity with
the Will of God and with the law of the Saviour Who is to be our Judge.
One immense blessing conferred on us by the knowledge that He will be
our Judge is that we know, by His teaching and by His example, what
are the principles of that righteousness and judgment which it is His
office to enforce. It points us to the records of His love and teaching
in the Gospels, to the messages of His Apostles, and to the Bible
which was His law, as our guide in daily life in all circumstances
and relations. That is the standard by which we shall be hereafter
judged; and in proportion as we believe and realize this, shall we
devote ourselves to its study and strive after its fulfilment. We are
sadly reminded now that in this world there is no comfort on which we
can permanently rely; but there is one comfort in life and in death of
which we may be assured; it is that which our Lord revealed to us, when
He gave us at once this command and this assurance, “If ye love me,
keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you
another Comforter, that He may abide with you for ever.” Let us seek
that comfort in life and in death, and it will not fail us.
DIVINE JUDGMENT AND RENOVATION.
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, OCTOBER 11, 1916.
“_And He that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things
new._”--Rev. xxi. 5.
These words were uttered by Him that sitteth on the throne, as the
interpretation of the grand vision which passed before the Apostle at
the conclusion of the Revelation vouchsafed to him. “I saw,” he says,
“a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth
were passed away.... And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying,
Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them,
and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and
be their God. And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and
there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall
there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And He
that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.”
But this vision was the sequel of fearful scenes which had passed
before the Apostle as the future course of the Divine judgments
was unrolled before him. He had witnessed a terrible succession of
destructions, and plagues, and wars, falling upon the inhabitants of
the earth, involving miseries and sufferings incalculable. He had seen
passing before him the awful punishments inflicted upon the enemies of
God, of Christ, of righteousness, and truth. One quotation in the final
scene will be enough to remind you of the nature of the visions. “I saw
an angel,” says the Apostle (chapter xix. 17), “standing in the sun;
and he cried with a loud voice, saying to all the fowls that fly in the
midst of heaven, Come and gather yourselves together unto the supper
of the great God; that ye may eat the flesh of kings, and the flesh of
captains, and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of
them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond,
small and great.” At length, when these fearful plagues and judgments
are completed the Apostle sees a great white throne and Him that sat
on it, from Whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there
was found no place for them. Then the books were opened, and the dead,
who stood before God, both small and great, were judged, every man
according to their works. Then it is, after this awful consummation,
that the Apostle sees a new heaven and a new earth. And He that sits
upon the great white throne says, “Behold, I make all things new.”
Such, in brief, is the burden of the Book of Revelation. It will
be observed that it involves these two cardinal points: First, the
judgment and the extirpation of all that is evil by a series of
struggles and agonies; and secondly, after this terrible experience,
the creation of all things new. The first part, however, in the
process of the Divine administration, consists of a series of scenes
of miseries, disasters, and bloodshed than which nothing more terrible
can be imagined, and which are described with a lurid force to which
no other human writing offers anything comparable. War and disease
and the confusion of all the elements of human society, and even of
heaven and earth, are brought before us, until men are reduced to
cry to the very mountains and rocks to cover them. All is described
as the inevitable result of the wrath of God against evil and its
representatives, and a fearful joy is ascribed to the heavenly beings
who behold this vindication of the Divine righteousness. The four and
twenty elders fall on their faces and worship God, saying (xi. 17), “We
give Thee thanks, O Lord God Almighty, Which art and wast and art to
come, because Thou hast taken to Thee Thy great power and hast reigned.
And the nations were angry, and Thy wrath is come, and the time of
the dead, that they should be judged, and that Thou shouldest give
reward unto Thy servants the prophets, and to the Saints, and to them
that fear Thy Name, small and great, and shouldest destroy them which
destroy the earth.” And then in awful response are heard, in the temple
of God, “lightnings and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake and
great hail.”
These dread scenes, these fearful judgments, are depicted as the
inevitable preliminary in the manifestation of the Divine Will and
the establishment of the Divine Kingdom. This is the main fact which
stands out broadly from the Book. It is not necessary, for the purpose
of appreciating this, to comprehend the signification of each of the
awful scenes which are predicted. How far they are capable of any
explanation before the final events may well be doubted. Old Testament
prophecy remained in great part mysterious until the moment of its
accomplishment, and the full interpretation of Christian prophecy
can hardly be less dependent upon its actual realization. But one
thing is plain, that the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ upon
earth, the full realization of all its promises of peace and goodwill,
the complete manifestation of the glory and power of its King--that
these great hopes and blessed promises cannot, according to the Book
of Revelation, be realized without the world passing through scenes
of fearful struggle and misery, and without the execution of Divine
judgment upon the evil and falsehood with which it abounds.
These are stern truths which it is well for us to bear in mind amidst
the terrible scenes which are now being enacted in the present war. The
New Testament begins with promises of peace, and it ends with a vision
of peace and glory in which God will wipe away all tears from our
eyes; but the warning is conveyed to us, through the mouth of the last
Apostle, that this blessed condition cannot be reached except through a
manifestation of Divine justice and Divine wrath, which will bring upon
earth and upon all mankind inconceivable miseries. The sins of men must
be brought into judgment. The Divine righteousness must expose their
real character by the consequences they naturally involve. The truth
must be manifested that there is a Judge of all the earth, Who brings
every work of man into judgment, whether it be good or whether it be
evil; and the evil in the works of men is so deep and far-reaching
that its judgment must needs involve the most terrible suffering. In
proportion as God takes to Himself His great power and reigns, the
first result must be seen in these agonies of human nature, and must
culminate in the disruption of the very elements of nature itself.
It is well we should remind ourselves how fearfully these pictures
of the Apostle of love have been fulfilled in the history of the
world since his time. It was not long after he wrote, when a series
of persecutions broke upon the Christian Church, which were at length
avenged by terrible intestine wars between the heads of the Roman
Empire, and in due course of time, by the overthrow of that Empire
itself in a long series of wars and devastations, which can only be
fitly described in some of the vivid language of the Apocalypse itself.
It would be appalling if we could realize the extent to which Europe
was filled with “blood and fire and vapour of smoke” during the five or
six centuries which elapsed between the overthrow of the Roman Empire
and the establishment of the Christian civilisation of the Middle
Ages. Then followed the incalculable miseries and untold bloodshed
involved in the contest between the Christian and the Mohammedan
world, throughout the long period of the Crusades. Add to this all the
intestine wars between Christians themselves during the Middle Ages,
and the fearful devastation of which the East was the victim in the
course of Mohammedan conquests and revolutions, and you have before
your eyes a picture not adequately described elsewhere than in this
terrible Book. The Reformation was followed by a long series of wars,
during which a great part of the surface of Europe suffered the most
cruel devastations; and even to the present day the whole world open to
our observation has been suffering from almost continuous bloodshed in
one part or other of its surface.
The scenes which strike us with such horror at this moment are but a
specimen of agonies which have been endured for long generations in
the successive struggles of mankind; and if we are horrified at the
wars and agonies around us, we may be reminded, by the readiness of all
nations for such conflicts, that they are almost the normal condition
of humanity. In the middle of the last century Burke calculated that,
assuming the numbers of men then upon earth to be computed at 500
millions at the most, the slaughter of mankind in the various wars
and revolutions which were known up to that date amounted to upwards
of seventy times that number, or 35,000 millions. That, on what
he thought a moderate estimate, represents the amount of bloodshed
which the passions of men had, up to his time, inflicted upon human
society. How much more is to be added to that tremendous calculation
for the wars which have followed since that date in the East and West?
Taking these facts into account, we shall see good reason to recognize
that the Book of Revelation, in its fearful scenes, is but a true
description of the actual experience of mankind. The plagues, and
destructions, and slaughters which that Book depicts, as the result of
the just judgments of God, have, as a matter of fact, been realized,
and it is through scenes of suffering and misery of this nature that
the world is being conducted by the Divine justice to its ultimate goal.
But we have the more reason to be inexpressibly thankful that that
goal is revealed to us as one of peace and bliss. It is when we bear
in mind the miseries and agonies which the Book of Revelation depicts,
and which are brought so bitterly home to us by such a war as the
present, that we realize the full force of the promise that “God shall
wipe away all tears from their eyes, and there shall be no more death,
neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain:
for the former things are passed away.” Seeing what the world has
been hitherto, and the miseries by which it is burdened now, we might
well despair of such a result, unless we had the express assurance of
Revelation that there is One sitting upon the throne Who gives this
as the very definition of His work, “Behold, I make all things new.”
We should, indeed, be ungrateful not to recognize that the state of
things around us contains in itself some pledge and earnest of this
revelation. Grievously as the passions of mankind degrade them in
practice, there is nevertheless publicly recognized, in principle,
a higher standard of responsibility, a higher and more universal
obligation to maintain peace and goodwill on earth, than at any
previous time in the world’s history. Even amidst such a war as is now
waging, principles have been established for its conduct, which produce
a great alleviation of its miseries, compared with those which were
suffered in the great struggles of nations and of races in previous
ages, or even during the last century. But still, none must feel more
grievously than those who have the conduct of human affairs how slight
would be our hopes of the establishment of complete peace on earth, did
it depend simply on the wisdom or strength of even the wisest leaders
of mankind. They cannot extirpate the passions which are the real
ultimate cause of the wars and fightings among us. They cannot take out
of men’s hearts the lusts which war in their members, and which nullify
the best laws and institutions. Our hope lies in the assured faith
that all the terrible scenes of which the earth is full, like those
in the Book of Revelation, are under the control of Him that sitteth
on the throne, that they are working out great purposes of truth and
justice, that the actions of all men, small and great, are subject to
His ultimate judgment, and that, finally, when the issues of right and
wrong in this world have been thus worked out, in a manner which shall
vindicate the truth and righteousness of God, He will fulfill His great
work, in which He is even now engaged, of making all things new.
It is, indeed, an unconscious faith of this kind which sustains men,
and has ever sustained them, amidst the confusions and sufferings of
life and history. A deep instinct compels them to believe that they are
in the hands of a God of justice and truth, and to appeal to Him in
the midst of their struggles, and even in those crises in which their
best efforts seem to be defeated. But it is the special privilege, the
special grandeur, of the Christian Faith to have an explicit assurance
of this truth from the mouth of the Judge Himself. He said unto His
Apostle, “Write, for these words are true and faithful.” He, the King
of Peace, left with His last Apostle the warnings and the promises of
this Book. Lest men should be discouraged by the terrible experiences
through which they were yet to pass, He warned them beforehand that
such experiences were inevitable, and that the world would have to
pass through a purgatory of this kind; but at the same time He told
them that, when judgment was completed, a new Heaven and a new Earth
would be the result, and He bade them be assured that, amidst whatever
darkness and confusion, He was sitting on the throne making all things
new.
All that we have to do individually is to see that we are true to Him,
and in our hearts live in obedience to His will. In the text He goes
on to say to the Apostle, “I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the
end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the water of life freely.
He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and _I_ will be his God,
and he shall be My son.” “Blessed,” he says again, “are they that do
His commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and
may enter in through the gates into the city. For without are dogs,
and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and
whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.” We are not able, with our limited
and earthly vision, to discern “the work that God worketh from the
beginning of the world,” or the course of His judgments in the world
at large. That is beyond us, and we must submit and take our part,
whatever it may be, in these mysterious manifestations, possessing
our souls in the patience which such assurances as those in the text
can alone provide. But we can have the comfort, for our own selves,
of passing through this strange and painful scene in sure and certain
hope of our ultimate blessedness, provided in our own hearts and souls
we give ourselves up to the rule and the order of Him Who is the
Beginning and the End, the First and the Last, provided we make it the
whole purpose of our lives to do His commandments, and, by His grace,
overcome the evil which besets us in our own lives. Our personal and
private lives reflect in greater or less degree those stern experiences
which this Book describes in the case of the world at large. We have
our sins, and as the consequences of our sins our sufferings and
sorrows, desolations and punishments of various kinds, and we must
expect to have to bear them till the moment of our departure arrives.
But by God’s grace we are also allowed in some measure to anticipate
the privilege which is held out to the world at large, and which is our
own ultimate hope. The fulfilment of the blessed promise of making all
things new is not merely commenced, but, if we will, is consciously
commenced, within our hearts and souls while we are upon earth. “We
ourselves,” says St. Paul, “groan within ourselves, waiting for the
adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body,” just as “the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” But we
have the first-fruits of the Spirit. His grace is within us at all
times to give us new hearts and new spirits, to introduce His peace
into our souls, and to enable us to spread that peace around us. Let
us only seek it faithfully, and the renewing and replenishing water of
life will restore us and maintain our energies, and will be in us as a
well of water springing up into everlasting life.
RESISTANCE UNTO BLOOD.
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, GOOD-FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 1916.
“_Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin._”--Heb.
xii. 4.
“Ye have not yet resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” That is
the manner in which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews applies
the Cross of Christ as an example and an inspiration to Christians. He
is exhorting them to “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth
so easily beset us,” and to “run with patience the race that is set
before us,” “looking unto Jesus the Author and Perfecter of our Faith,
who, for the joy that was set before Him, endured the Cross.” It is an
aspect of our Saviour’s Cross which it is most important to realize
if its significance for ourselves is to be duly appreciated. What was
it that brought our Lord to the Cross? Of course, the ultimate cause
was that the will of God required that sacrifice to be made for the
expiation of human sin. “Him,” said St. Peter, “being delivered up by
the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and
by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” But God’s counsel and will
were worked out by human agencies; and it is of infinite interest to
consider what were the motives which led men like the leaders of the
Jewish nation to commit the awful crime of putting to death the Son of
God, manifested in perfect human nature. The simple explanation is that
He “resisted unto blood, striving against sin.” Our Lord strove against
sin, and sinners could not endure His antagonism; and the opposition
between the two was so intense that one or other of the two antagonists
had to be overpowered. That is the substance of the story of our
Lord’s life as told by the Evangelists. Our Lord came proclaiming that
the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand--a Kingdom with higher claims and
severer judgments than the Jews could tolerate. It claimed a spiritual
perfection instead of a legal one, an obedience of the heart instead
of a mere compliance in external acts; it penetrated into the secrets
of the conscience; and our Lord further declared that He Himself was
the Judge by Whom these claims would be enforced. The Jewish rulers
felt that this amounted to superseding themselves and their authority,
and they treated our Lord as a usurper who must be suppressed. The
tremendous denunciation of the Scribes and Pharisees: “Woe unto you,
Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” was an act of open and righteous
hostility to the authorities who had rejected His mission and spurned
His claims. They felt that He or they must be overthrown, and they used
the Roman Government to destroy Him.
It thus appears that our Lord’s crucifixion was the culminating
struggle in the never-ceasing battle between right and wrong,
righteousness and sin, in which the history of mankind consists. Our
Lord appeared as the representative of absolute righteousness, and He
was put to death because men could not endure that righteousness. In
His rejection by the Jews and His crucifixion by the Roman Governor,
the highest official representatives of human righteousness at that
time and place combined to condemn themselves. But they could not have
consummated that sacrifice without the consent and even co-operation
of our Lord Himself. He had power, if He had chosen to exert it, to
destroy them and assert His Divine supremacy. “Thinkest thou,” He
said, “that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently
give Me more than twelve legions of angels? But how, then, shall the
Scriptures be fulfilled, that thus it must be?” Instead of destroying
His enemies, He submitted to be put to death Himself. He allowed the
unrighteousness of human nature to break in full force upon His own
head; He Himself became its victim, and a victim of such infinite
greatness as to constitute an expiation for all the sin of mankind. Sin
and evil can only be avenged by an adequate exhibition and endurance
of their consequences. But that endurance and that manifestation were
afforded, in the highest conceivable form, in the destruction, so far
as men could effect it, of perfect goodness and holiness. That was
what our Lord’s submission to the Cross involved. When that expiation
had been made to God and God’s righteousness, our Lord assumed His
full authority as a Saviour and a Judge, and, by His Resurrection and
Ascension, established the Kingdom of Heaven in all its grace and
power. Henceforth men have lived under that dispensation of love as
well as of justice, and the Cross has been held aloft among them as the
means and the assurance of forgiveness and of grace.
No human being can imitate our Lord in that supreme act of
self-surrender to His Father’s will, by which He abandoned all His
right and power to avenge Himself on His enemies, and became the
supreme victim, and therefore atonement, for human sin. But it is
possible for men to follow Him in the course of action which brought
Him to that awful decision and agony. “He resisted unto blood, striving
against sin.” So far as we strive against sin and evil, whatever the
consequences to ourselves, we are following Him to the foot of the
Cross. It is not the mere endurance of suffering, the mere surrender
of life in itself, which renders us followers of our Lord in His
sacrifice: men have endured much and sacrificed much for more or less
selfish reasons, for ambition or for military glory and power. But
the essence of our Lord’s sacrifice was that it was made in the cause
of righteousness and truth only. “To this end was I born,” He said,
“and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness
unto the truth.” We are following Him so far as in all our words and
acts we are bearing witness unto the truth. That witness may at any
time involve suffering and death. God has so constituted mankind that
few great causes have ever been finally won without the voluntary
sacrifice of life. That sacrifice may sometimes be made, like that of
our Lord and of the martyrs, by the voluntary endurance of the cruel
penalties inflicted by the enemies of the truth; or it may be endured
in obedience to the claim of lawful authorities that we should take up
arms and offer our lives, in defence of some righteous cause. Men may
act in our Lord’s spirit if they submit to wrong in their own persons,
rather than avenge themselves. But the authorities who, as St. Paul
says, are the ministers of God, are bound to protect those committed
to their charge, and for that purpose have a right to call upon those
under them to use the sword at their command to defend the right. In
so using the sword at the command of their rulers, at whatever cost to
themselves, they also are acting in Christ’s spirit, because they are
upholding righteousness and asserting the truth in the manner required
by their duty. To all forms of organized sin the witness of the Jewish
sacrifices holds good. “Without shedding of blood is no remission.”
That, so long as the present dispensation lasts, is the unalterable law
of God’s Will and Word. Soldiers, therefore, who are obeying a lawful
command in defence of the right, are offering their lives in the spirit
in which Christ endured the Cross, and may claim the comfort of being
fellows with Him in the “holy war” of right against wrong.
But if the Cross of Christ is to be the centre of our lives, we must
strive to live in all things, and not only in such great crises as
those of war and the battlefield, in the spirit which brought our Lord
to His Cross--the spirit of absolute obedience in all things to the
righteous will of God. What the Spirit of the Cross requires of us
is the absolute surrender of our own wills to the will of God, and
the constant endeavour to bear witness to that will, and to promote
it in every part of our lives. It is not the mere meditation on the
sufferings of the Cross which will bring us into harmony with it.
The Apostles do not dwell much on them, profoundly as they must have
been moved by them. What they dwell on is the spirit which moved our
Saviour to accept them and to bear them. That spirit is to be discerned
throughout His life, as well as in His agony in the garden and in His
sayings on the Cross. It is embodied in His gracious words: “Whoever
shall do the will of My Father which is in Heaven, the same is My
brother and sister and mother.” The Cross is the highest and final
expression of His devotion and His Father’s will; but we can follow
that spirit in every duty, however humble. If the National Mission is
to fulfil its object, it must impress that spirit of supreme devotion
to the will of God, as revealed in Christ, upon the nation as a whole,
and the Cross must become the symbol of our national, no less than of
our individual, life.
THE KING’S ACCESSION AND INTERCESSION.
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, 1915.
“_I exhort, therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers,
intercessions, thanksgivings, be made for all men: for kings, and for
all that are in authority: that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life
in all godliness and honesty._”--1 Tim. ii. 1.
It is in fulfilment of the duty prescribed in this text that we
hold every year a Service of Thanksgiving and Intercession on the
anniversary of our King’s accession to the throne, and I am sure we
all know and appreciate the abundant reasons we have for offering such
thanksgivings. We know that every public action of the King since he
came to the throne has borne witness to his unreserved devotion to the
welfare of his subjects in all parts of his Empire. His visit, for
instance, to India was a very arduous and anxious undertaking, and was
prompted by his own desire to assure the Indian people of his deep
personal care for them, and also to strengthen the bonds between them
and his subjects at home; and no doubt the generous service which
Indian princes and soldiers are now rendering to the Empire on the
plains of Flanders is in great measure due to the influence of that
visit, in deepening the loyalty and devotion of his Indian subjects.
We have had abundant evidence, moreover, in the last few months, of
the King’s deep sympathy with his people in the sorrows and losses
which this war is inflicting upon them. He has sent his son and heir
to serve with his soldiers at the Front, and has himself visited them
there to thank and cheer them, and he has lately set a very conspicuous
example of personal self-denial in the ordinary habits of life. We see
that the King and Queen live for the good of their subjects, and for
the promotion of all that is good and true and gracious throughout
their vast Empire, and that their example is one of the chief
influences which are working among us for these noble ends. Knowing and
appreciating all this, I need not say more to induce you to join with a
full heart to-day in the words of our Service, and to “yield unfeigned
thanks to God” that He was pleased, as on this day, to place His
servant our Sovereign Lord King George upon the throne of this realm.
But I think it may be desirable and opportune to lay some special
stress on those intercessions which we are bidden to offer “for
kings and for all that are in authority, that we may lead a quiet
and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” Those words remind
us, first of all, that the purpose of God, so far as this world is
concerned, is that we may live a life of peace in all godliness and
honour--a state of peace in which men may enjoy the happiness for
which God intended them, in which they may “replenish the earth and
subdue it,” and develop to the utmost the faculties and capacities
with which God has endowed them. That is the main object to be kept in
view for the purpose of the present life. The next fact of which the
words remind us is that the maintenance of these peaceful conditions
of life depends mainly upon Kings and all that are in authority. It
does not depend merely upon Kings, but also upon those in authority,
who are the Kings’ Ministers. In some parts of the world, as in this
country, Kings no longer have the power by themselves, and of their own
motion, to determine the course of public affairs, to keep the peace or
to declare wars. Yet their position must always give them an immense
influence in the government of a nation; and even now, in the two
greatest countries of Europe--Germany and Russia, they have not merely
the supreme control, but the supreme initiative, in affairs of State.
The peace of the world, the possibility of our living a quiet and
peaceable life, depends in Europe, in the main, on the rulers of Russia
and Germany, upon those in authority in France, and upon the King of
England and his Ministers.
It is a momentous fact, and a surprising one to realize. God has so
constituted mankind that the welfare of the masses, of the millions of
ordinary men and women, depends upon the actions of a few dozens of
the leading men in the various countries of Europe. We are proud of
being a constitutional country, and of the fact that by the election
of members of Parliament--by selecting, that is, the members of the
House of Commons--the vast majority of Englishmen have a voice in
creating their own Government; and to a certain extent in that way we
govern ourselves. But nevertheless, in the last resort, the fate of the
country depends upon the dozen or two men who are placed in power by
the House of Commons. It is a simple fact that the mass of the people
in this country had no voice whatever in determining whether we should
or should not enter upon this terrible war. It was determined for us in
the course of a few hours by the King’s Ministers, and by the action
they took in their relations with other countries. In the nature of the
case it must be so. Whether they will or not, great masses of people
and great nations cannot do without a Government; and when they have
established one, that Government must necessarily act in many critical
emergencies without waiting to consult the people whom it governs. A
nation and its King, with his Ministers, constitute as much one body,
to use St. Paul’s image, as the various elements and limbs of the human
body and its brain. We become one single organism, under the control
and management of the brain of that organism, which is the King and
his Ministers. It is an awful responsibility for men to have entrusted
to them, to be able to declare war and thus to launch many millions
of men in their own country, and hundreds of millions of men in the
Empire and in other countries, upon a gigantic struggle, of which all
we know for certain at the outset is that it will involve a sacrifice
of tens of thousands of lives, the devastation of fair countries, and
the waste of enormous treasure. But so it is and ever must be. In the
freest republics that ever existed the chief rulers have had similarly
to act as the brain of the whole people; and it depends on their wisdom
and faithfulness, not merely at critical moments, but in that daily
administration of affairs out of which critical moments arise, whether
the people shall live a quiet and peaceable life or not.
We must add to this the fact--which no one would be more ready
to recognize than these leaders and rulers, Kings, Ministers, or
Presidents, themselves--that the affairs with which they have to deal,
the problems they have to solve, are too vast and mysterious to be
fully grasped by any human brain, and that they are liable to the
most grievous miscalculations. If you need evidence of this, look at
the outbreak of the present war. Our rulers in this country had no
idea at all, within a few days of the event, that such a war was about
to break upon us; the rulers of all other nations have been loudly
proclaiming, ever since it began, that they are not responsible for it,
and that it would not have happened but for circumstances which they
could not foresee or control. There seem, indeed, to have been wild and
unscrupulous spirits in Germany who were eager for it, and who had long
been intriguing for it; but none the less it burst upon Europe suddenly
and unexpectedly, and it baffled the foresight of European statesmen in
general. In the face of such imperfect competence for these problems
of statesmanship, and of such enormous responsibility for them, are
we not compelled to stretch out our hands towards Heaven, and implore
God’s guidance for the rulers who are feeling their way amidst such
dim lights--“for kings and for all in authority,” upon whose words
and actions the fate of the world and its peace, the happiness and
the very life of millions of men and women are dependent? If, indeed,
we could not do so, we might well despair. We should behold before us
a mass of nations rising against one another, blinded--as we see in
Germany that nations can be blinded--by passion and pride, and fighting
wildly, almost like men in the dark, and we might well feel helpless
before such a chaos. But knowing, as it is the privilege of Christians
to know, that “the Lord sitteth above the water-floods,” that “the Lord
remaineth a King for ever,” knowing, as another Psalm says, that “the
Lord is King, be the people never so impatient. He sitteth between the
cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet,” we cry unto the Lord in our
trouble, and implore Him to deliver us out of our distress.
There is another reason for our thus appealing to Him, which is, that
we are assured by His Word that the whole history of the world has
been under his control, and that He has been directing its course
throughout, and determining the fate of nations for His own purposes.
We have before us the most conclusive evidence of this in the history
of the Jews. The course of their history and their position in the
world at the present day were announced to Abraham and Moses thousands
of years ago, and they have fulfilled, and are now fulfilling, the
place and the function in the world which were then assigned to them.
There is nothing, accordingly, on which the Bible insists more urgently
and constantly than that the great issues of war and history are in the
hands of God. It is not merely that He exercises a general controlling
influence over them, but that He has His own purposes, which He is
gradually fulfilling by means of “the unruly wills and affections
of sinful men.” It teaches us that “except the Lord build the house
they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city the
watchman watcheth but in vain.” He does not merely interpose in the
course of the building, but He is the Builder. He is building up,
through the ages, some great design, and all nations will be made in
the end to conform to it.
It is certain, for instance, that it was not by our design or
forethought, or our skill, that the Empire which we are now called on
to defend was built up. A hundred years ago--nay, fifty years ago--no
statesman seems to have imagined that the British Empire would grow,
or could grow, to the vast dimensions it now possesses. Not merely
did they not imagine it--some of them actually deprecated its growth.
It has not been by our will and design, but in great measure against
them, that the British nations have been developed into one great
body politic. It must be the hand of God which we see in all that
development. We have, whether we will or no, a great work laid upon
us all over the world--in India, in America, and in the Islands of
the sea--and we recognize that it is by God’s will that this task and
responsibility, which is at the same time a great privilege, has been
laid upon us. We may well, therefore, implore continually His help
and guidance in the discharge of it. Is it not, then, an imperative
duty, is not St. Paul right in putting it in the very forefront of our
duties, that we should offer up supplications, intercessions, urgent
prayers for the King and for all in authority under him, that they
may be guided to know God’s will in the vast problems which are set
before them? that “God’s wisdom may be their guide and that His Arm may
strengthen them,” and that He may direct their actions and endeavours
to His own glory, to the accomplishment of His great designs, and to
the welfare of our people?
Let us ask ourselves earnestly whether we have realized, as we ought,
since this war began, that it is in God’s hands, and not in ours, to
determine its issue. War is not merely an appeal to the sword--it is,
in a far higher degree, an appeal, the final appeal, to God Himself.
Lord Bacon observes that great soldiers and Commanders have always been
conspicuous for their acknowledgment that the issues of their great
battles and campaigns all depended upon some supernatural power. They
knew better than others the infinite accidents and chances upon which
the issue of war depends, and they realized that it was in God’s power
to determine that issue as He pleased. I fear it must be owned that we
have not, as yet, acknowledged this truth in the present war as much as
we ought. If we had, would not the Services of Intercession in this
Cathedral and elsewhere be more frequently and more earnestly attended?
Let us be reminded then, by this Service of Prayer and Supplication,
on the anniversary of the Accession of our King, how deeply he and
his Ministers need that prayer and intercession, how wholly dependent
they are, in bearing the momentous burdens laid upon them, upon “the
good hand of our God upon them”; and let us henceforth “pray without
ceasing” for God’s blessing upon our King, and particularly, at this
time, for his victory over the bitter enemies by whom he has been
forced into this dreadful struggle.
THE CHRISTIAN SANCTION OF WAR.
AT THE SERVICE OF INTERCESSION FOR THE KING’S NAVAL AND MILITARY FORCES
IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, AUGUST, 1914.
We are assembled here this afternoon, at the call of our King in
Council and of our Archbishop, for the purpose of solemn intercession
with Almighty God on behalf of his Majesty’s naval and military
forces now engaged in war. That is in accordance with the solemn
practice of our fathers at all the great crises of our history; and
it is only about fourteen years since we were similarly interceding
with Almighty God in this cathedral, when the King’s forces were
engaged in an arduous struggle in South Africa. But the gravity of our
present struggle is greater than that of any in the memory of living
men, perhaps greater than that of any other in our history. The very
existence of our Empire, and even the independence of our Kingdom, is
at stake; and the Power by which we are threatened has been, of late
years, deemed the greatest military force in Europe, and a naval force
only second to our own. It may be that the capacities and resources
of our Kingdom and Empire will be strained as they have never been
strained before, and that all our manhood, and even our womanhood,
will be called upon for all the force and endurance of which they are
capable. Prayer to God is incumbent upon us at all times; but there
are special reasons why, in a great war, it is the most important of
all duties, and the most precious of all privileges. The issues of war
are, in an extraordinary degree, beyond the control of man. The issue
of a battle or a campaign may, in fact, be determined by incidents,
moral and physical, which no human power can foresee or control. Our
own deliverance from the Spanish Armada was certainly determined, in an
incalculable degree, by the tremendous storm which wrecked the Spanish
fleet at the critical moment; and again and again in history have
great battles been decided by influences of that nature, or by some
incalculable turn in the feeling and temper of an army. Consequently,
when nations go to war they place themselves and their fortunes in the
hands of God in a more absolute manner than in any other human affairs.
That is what we have now done by declaring war against Germany; and we
have, therefore, more reason than at any other time in our history to
fall before God’s footstool, and to implore Him for the protection and
blessing which He, and He only, can give us. It is still more true now
than in the Psalmist’s time that “there is no king that can be saved by
the multitude of an host, neither is any mighty man delivered by much
strength; an horse is counted but a vain thing to save a man, neither
shall he deliver any man by his great strength. Behold the eye of the
Lord is upon them that fear Him, and upon them that put their trust in
His mercy.” In that spirit we now bow before His throne--in the words
of our daily prayer in time of war and tumult--before the throne of
“the only Giver of all victory.”
Coming before Him in these solemn circumstances, and with this
momentous petition, it becomes us to ask ourselves whether we are doing
so in a spirit, and with a cause, in which we can expect His blessing,
and a favourable answer to our prayers. “If I incline unto wickedness
with my heart,” says the Psalmist, “the Lord will not hear me.” If we
are to offer our prayers with a believing and confident heart, we must
have our conscience clear; and before men ask God’s blessing in so
tremendous an issue as that of war, they must consider with the most
solemn earnestness whether they can feel assured that what they are
doing and asking is in accordance with His will.
As to the lawfulness of war itself, though some good Christian minds
are troubled by the question, the answer seems clear and simple. War
is justifiable for the same reason that it is lawful to put men to
death for great crimes, like murder and treason. The conscience of
mankind at large, the conscience of Christian States at large, has
uniformly wielded the sword of justice in avenging and averting, by the
punishment of death, such crimes of violence and treachery as destroy
the very frame of Society. That use of the sword of justice, moreover,
has the express support of Revelation, for St. Paul has declared that
the ruler “beareth not the sword in vain; he is the minister of God,
an avenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” But if it is
lawful to use the sword of justice against individuals, it must be
equally lawful to use it against a community of individuals--in other
words, against a society, or a nation, who are unjustly destroying or
threatening the lives and the peace of another society or nation. The
use of the sword--which is an elementary name for war--has been shown
by thousands of years of experience to be, in the last resort, the only
effectual means of punishing and preventing unjust violence. It is vain
to argue what might be possible or desirable if man were an uncorrupt
creature. He is, as a matter of fact, a sinful creature; and, as St.
Paul plainly says, it is God Himself who has put the sword into the
hands of human authority to punish, and to restrain, the effects of
that sinfulness.
Thus the mere fact of our resort to the sword need not of itself burden
our consciences. But if this account of its awful purpose be true, one
indispensable condition for its use is obviously requisite. If the
purpose of the sword is to punish injustice, then we must take care
that it is used for that solemn purpose only. It was not given to men
to enable them to gratify their ambition or pride, or to enlarge their
kingdoms at their pleasure, or for any selfish purpose whatever. He
who draws the sword for any purpose but that of upholding justice and
judgment on the earth is committing the crime of murder on the vastest
scale, and renders himself justly liable to the stern use of the sword
against himself. If, therefore, we are to come before God with a clear
conscience at this moment, we must be able to say, from our hearts,
that we have not now drawn the sword from any selfish motive, or under
the influence of any violent passion, but that we have drawn it simply
and solely in the discharge of our bounden duty, and in fulfilment of
just promises and engagements to our neighbours. My brethren, I believe
it may be confidently asserted that this country has never been engaged
in a war in respect to which this could be said with more unqualified
confidence than in the present case.
I think, indeed, we may thankfully consider, in reviewing our long
history, that the wars by which our Empire has been developed and
established have, on the whole, been of this character, and have
not been prompted by either national or dynastic ambition. The
wars under Queen Elizabeth, in which the germs of our Empire were
laid, were mainly prompted by a just indignation against the cruel
and superstitious tyranny of Spain; and the wars of Marlborough
and Wellington were similarly fought to protect Europe against an
overbearing and unjust domination. In the heat of those struggles we
may have been betrayed, in some instances, into an unjust use of the
sword; but, on the whole, we may thank God that the wars which have
established Great Britain in its present position have been--at least
mainly--fought in just causes. Certainly in the present instance we
have no other motive or object. We covet no other nation’s possessions;
we have not interfered--and do not desire to interfere--with any other
nation’s affairs; we would not willingly exert our influence for any
other purpose but that of promoting righteousness and freedom; and if,
in our later history, we have erred, as human beings can hardly avoid
erring sometimes, the errors have been due to a failure of judgment,
and not of motive or intention. As to the particular occasion of this
war, we have offered no provocation whatever, except what has been
called “the strong antipathy” of right to wrong; the provocation which
adherence to promise and treaties must ever offer to those who would
break them; the provocation which defence of the weak must ever offer
to those who would overbear them. We can say in a word, with a good
conscience, that we are at least earnestly endeavouring to act as the
servants of Him of Whom the Psalmist exclaims: “The Lord is King; the
earth may be glad thereof; yea, the multitude of the isles may be glad
thereof. Clouds and darkness are round about Him; righteousness and
judgment are the habitation of His seat.” It is in the cause of that
righteousness and judgment that we desire to act.
But there is one other condition that we must fulfil, if we are to
dare to claim the favour of God in this great struggle. We must not
only ask whether we are upholding righteousness in our public action
but whether we are observing it in our own hearts, and in our national
life. Sufferings, we are told in our Prayer Book, may be sent “to
correct and amend in us whatever doth offend the eyes of our Heavenly
Father.” Can we fail to be sensible that there is much in our lives,
both private and public, which must offend His eyes? Our private sins
must be left to our private consciences. But who has not listened
during the last few years, with a painful sense of their justice,
to reproaches among ourselves at the luxury, the extravagance, the
reckless pursuit of pleasure, the general self-indulgence, which have
been too prevalent among us? With what heart can men appeal for God’s
favour and protection, in their hour of need, who, in their hours of
well-being, have neglected His worship and disregarded His Word and
Sacraments? Before going into battle as a nation and as individuals,
let us seek His absolution in that comprehensive prayer of our Litany
“that it would please Him to give us true repentance, to forgive us all
our sins, negligences, and ignorances, and to endue us with the grace
of His Holy Spirit to amend our lives according to His Holy Word.”
In so far as we approach Him in this spirit, we may humbly hope for
His blessing on the bravery and the self-sacrifice of our sailors and
soldiers. Those sacrifices, moreover, alike for them and for ourselves,
will be relieved of their worst bitterness, and will be glorified by
a sacred and Divine example. They will not be fruitless sacrifices.
They will be sacrifices which will win for the fellow-countrymen of
those who offer them, and for the world at large, grand additions to
that edifice of righteousness and judgment, of Christian civilization,
towards which the hopes of mankind are directed with an inexpressible
yearning. If this war results, as we now pray that it may, in the
reassertion of principles which were in danger of being forgotten
or overridden, in the re-establishment of the faith of treaties,
and in the protection of the weak against the strong, it will have
established for Europe and the world a great consolidation and advance
in the essential principles of national truth and justice. It is a
comparatively poor thing to die for glory, or for power and wealth;
but it is a grand thing to die for righteousness and equity, for the
God who allows us to be His instruments in upholding them, and for
the King and country whose call we are proud to obey. If, moreover,
men go to war in this spirit, they may claim a still more Divine
privilege. In the sacrifice which soldiers make in a righteous cause,
they are following, in the most essential characteristic, the “author
and finisher of our Faith,” the “Captain of our Salvation,” whose
work is summed up in that soldier-like phrase, “He resisted unto
blood, striving against sin.” The soldier who sheds his blood on the
battlefield in a righteous cause, and with a righteous purpose, is
doing the very thing that Christ did, and he may be assured of Christ’s
approval and blessing. In quiet times we may fail to realize adequately
the solemn truth that, whenever we receive the Holy Communion, we are
receiving spiritual benefits which were won for us by the sacrifice of
the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ. If war, in one aspect, is a
horrible thing, so was the Cross; but the whole hope of the salvation
of mankind, here and hereafter, was won by that Divine bloodshed; and
its grace and glory are reflected over every battlefield, in which
blood is shed in the long struggle against unrighteousness. In these
convictions, and with these solemn resolves, let us now appeal to God,
in firm and humble faith, for His help in this hour of need; and let us
enter into this dread conflict with the full assurance that “God is our
refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
THE WARNING OF THE TOWER IN SILOAM.
PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, OCTOBER 25, 1914.
“_I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise
perish._”--Luke xiii. 1-5.
“Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” In these solemn
words, twice repeated, our Lord affords us a flash of light upon the
principles and methods of the Divine judgments, and utters a solemn
warning; and I think that both the revelation and the warning will be
found intensely applicable to the distressing sufferings and anxieties
through which we and our country are now passing. Our Lord had been
speaking about the severity of the Divine justice, and about the
blindness of men in not foreseeing the approach of His judgments. “Ye
hypocrites,” He said, “ye can discern the face of the sky and of the
earth; but how is it that ye do not discern this time? Yea, and why
even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?” and He warns them that
if they fall into the hands of justice, they will not depart thence
till they have paid the very last mite. At this mention of the Divine
judgment, some who were present told Him of a dreadful act of violence
which had recently occurred, of some Galilæans, “whose blood Pilate
had mingled with their sacrifices.” It would seem they were members of
an extremely zealous sect of Jews, who objected to the custom which
then prevailed of offering sacrifices in the Temple for the welfare of
the Roman Government; and Pilate treated their conduct as treasonable,
and had them slaughtered in the Temple while they were offering their
own sacrifices. The object of the interruption seems to have been to
ask our Lord whether these men had brought such a punishment upon
themselves by unusual sin, and it may also have been intended to tempt
Him to pronounce some censure on Pilate, and thus to bring Himself into
conflict with the Roman authorities. But our Lord’s reply lifts the
matter at once out of any personal or local bearings, and lays down a
principle which applies to all such tragedies. “Suppose ye,” He said,
“that these Galilæans were sinners above all the Galilæans because
they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye
shall all likewise perish.” He drives the truth home by applying it to
another recent tragedy, which might have seemed a mere accident. “Those
eighteen,” He said, “upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them,
think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?
I tell you, Nay; but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.”
It is not for you, He seems to say, to be curious about the reason why
these particular men have suffered in this way. What you should do is
to learn that you are all liable to suffer in the same way, and that
you will do so unless you repent.
Now, it will be seen that there is a momentous revelation contained
in these words, respecting the real cause of such dreadful disasters
as these two incidents illustrated. When He says, “Except ye repent,
ye shall all likewise perish,” He clearly intimates that a Divine
judgment is going forward in the world, which sooner or later brings
suffering and destruction upon men in consequence of their sin. Even
what we might call a physical accident, like the fall of a tower which
kills eighteen persons, is a warning to men that they are liable to
such a death at any moment, and that, therefore, they should repent
and be prepared for it. It is an example of what may befall any of us,
and of what will befall all of us in one way or another, unless we
repent. If we look more particularly into the example of the men whom
Pilate slaughtered, we shall realize that it has a peculiarly close
application to our own day. These men, who were resisting the Roman
Government, were examples of the vehement passions which were at that
time surging among the Jewish people. Our Lord Himself was the victim
of the fierce hatred of foreign influence which prevailed among the
people. The priests and Pharisees said among themselves, “What do we?
For this man doeth many miracles, and if we let Him thus alone, all
men will believe on Him, and the Romans will come and take away both
our place and our nation.” And the High Priest, Caiaphas, replied, “Ye
know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us that one
man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.”
Thus it was that the passions of the Jewish people were worked up into
such blindness and wickedness, that they committed the awful crime of
putting our Lord to death; and then in forty years the prediction of
our Lord was fulfilled, and the great mass of them perished in just
such a slaughter as that which Pilate committed, the blood of the
nation being shed in torrents in the Courts of the Temple, and amidst
its sacrifices. These events--the massacre by Pilate, the murder of
our Lord, the destruction of the Jewish people--were not separate and
disconnected events. They were all the consequence of the sins and
evil passions which our Lord denounced among the Jews of His time;
and the disasters which the Jews suffered were the judgments of God’s
righteousness upon those sins.
Now what this reveals to us is the constitution of that world of human
society amidst which we live. The bedrock of it, the basis of its
whole constitution, is the righteousness of God and His unwavering
maintenance of His moral laws. As the Psalmist says, “Clouds and
darkness are round about Him,” and we cannot follow in all respects
His mysterious dispensations; but one thing we know for certain, that
“righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His seat.” All His
providential government of mankind is based on the assertion of right
and the punishment and repression of wrong; and, as another prophet
says, when you see God’s judgments in the world you may be sure that
the object of them is that the inhabitants of the world may learn
righteousness. But it is of the first importance we should realize
how those judgments are for the most part executed. It is not, as a
rule, by the special and visible interposition of God’s hand. There
have been times, indeed, as on various occasions in the history of
the Jews, such as the deliverance of His people from Egypt, when God
manifestly interposed, by miraculous means, to punish His enemies and
to deliver His people. But for the most part, and in the general course
of history, the moral and religious laws which God has established in
human nature are left to work out their natural consequences, and men
are punished not merely because of their sins, but by their sins, and
by the working out of their sins in their lives. The explanation of the
chief troubles of mankind, and in particular of the wars and sufferings
which have cursed the earth from generation to generation, is contained
in that statement of St. James: “From whence come wars and fightings
among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your
members? Ye lust and have not: ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot
obtain: ye fight and war, yet ye have not, because ye ask not. Ye ask,
and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your
lusts.” When the men and women of whom a nation is composed give way
to those lusts of which St. James speaks, to covetousness, jealousy,
sensuality, and untruthfulness, they are gradually storing up the fuel
of passions for some great conflagration, which arises in the natural
course of things, as the consequence of some great public injustice
into which they are betrayed. They thus rouse the indignation of other
people, they commit injustices which must be resisted, and then the
world is convulsed in some great war like the present.
War, in fact, is the natural penalty by which, under God’s
constitution of the world, the evil passions of men punish themselves.
We may take an example from the physical world. The earth under our
feet is held together, and affords us a sure foothold, by virtue of
certain physical and chemical laws which are perpetually at work in it,
such as the law of gravitation and the laws of chemical attraction.
They are always working silently, and it is by means of the incessant
action of those laws that the whole face of the earth is maintained
from day to day. But from time to time, from some causes which we
do not yet understand, something occurs to disturb their ordinary
peaceful course, and then by their own natural action they produce
some tremendous convulsions, like earthquakes or the eruptions of
volcanoes. So it is with the moral world of national and international
life. It is maintained in peace and stability, as a rule, by the
principles of mutual trust and regard, if not of love, which are at
the root of social and political life; but if falsehood and jealousy
and covetousness accumulate in some part of the world, there is sure,
sooner or later, to be a terrible convulsion and a devastating
eruption of “blood and fire and vapour of smoke.” War is thus the
outburst, the visible embodiment, of the passions behind it, of the
accumulated sins which nations and generations have been indulging. We
look with horror on war and all its miseries, and justly so; but what
we ought to look on with more horror are the sins and wickedness and
passions of which war is the inevitable result. People say that war
is wrong, and of course it is wrong that there should be war; but the
wrong in it is not the actual waging of the war, not at least the using
of the sword, in the Name of God, to assert right against wrong; that
is the bounden duty of the lawful authority. Where the wrong lies is in
the passions which make the war, and which compel men to resort to so
terrible a vindication of righteousness.
Have we not, I must ask, a glaring illustration of the profound moral
principles thus asserted by our Lord in the present war? The means
of communication in our day enable us to realize the feelings which
are at work over the face of Europe amidst this terrible convulsion;
and there is one fact which is appallingly conspicuous in that
manifestation. That fact is the falsehood, the hatred, the violent
imputations of evil motives, the overbearing ambition which are at work
in the great nation--for a great nation it is--with which we are at
war. As I will presently observe, I am far from acquitting ourselves
of all blame in the matter. There was never a human struggle yet in
which either side was perfectly free from blame; but as to the gross
misrepresentations which are eagerly disseminated abroad respecting
the motives and the conduct of this country, there can be no question
whatever, and no adequate excuse. Whatever faults and errors we have
committed, our statesmen have not been animated in the development of
our Empire by greed and selfish ambition, or by a mere desire to be
supreme over other nations. So far as our enemies are acting upon these
ideas of our motives, they are absolutely blind; and there is nothing
more terrible in the revelations which this war affords than that
individuals and nations are capable of such absolute delusions, on so
vast a scale, respecting one another’s motives and characters. It is
plain that what has made this war is a total absence of that Christian
charity between individuals and nations which St. Paul inculcates as
“the very bond of all virtues,” and which is therefore the bond of all
society. The most heart-rending thing, after all, is not that we are at
war, but that Christian nations should be capable, in their daily life
and thought, of such an absolute negation of those principles of moral
life and faith which our Lord came to establish among us. Our Lord here
warns us that unless men repent of this uncharitable temper, and of the
sins associated with it, war can never be abolished, and we shall all
perish in some fearful conflagration. At present the conflagration,
like the tower in Siloam, has wrought its destruction mainly upon
others than ourselves. A modern despot, indignant, like Pilate, at
opposition to the claims of his nation, has mingled the blood of
Belgian men and women and children with their sacrifices, with their
ruined churches and desolated homes. But it is certainly not because a
people like the brave Belgians were sinners above all men that dwelt
in Europe that they have thus suffered. “I tell you, Nay,” our Lord’s
Voice is heard in this text; “but, except ye repent, ye shall all
likewise perish.” Look to yourselves; ask yourselves whether there are
or have been sins prevailing among you which, under the laws of God’s
righteousness, must work out their evil consequence in your social and
national life; and repent, lest ye likewise perish.
It is impossible, in dealing with this subject, not to express, as
I have done, a deep indignation at the motives and the spirit which
have been displayed by our enemies in this war. But we should miss the
whole purpose of our Lord’s warning unless we applied it in the first
instance, and in the main, to ourselves. Let us bear in mind that what
has happened in Belgium and France might in conceivable circumstances,
in the further development of scientific warfare, in the air as well
as in the sea, happen to ourselves; and let us take to heart the clear
warning of our Lord that the only way to avert such destructions, and
to avoid perishing ourselves, is to repent, and from our hearts to
cultivate among us those principles of charity, truth, righteousness
and religion, which alone can keep human nature in peace.
After all, can we be sure that we are not partly to blame for this
war by our own faults and failures? Have our statesmen, have we
as a nation, been looking facts in the face and meeting them with
faithfulness and self-sacrifice? Do not many among us ask whether this
war would ever have been possible if we had realized our danger and
our duty in time, and prepared ourselves, at whatever cost, to avert
the danger? How far have we, and those who guide us, allowed ourselves
to be diverted from the truth of our condition by sectarian and party
passions and uncharitable class jealousies? Have we seriously laid to
heart “the great dangers we are in by our unhappy divisions?” Is it
compatible with the love of God and of Christ that those divisions
should prevail so far as to lead to the curtailment of the Christian
instruction of our school-children, and the secularization of property
left by our ancestors for the hallowing of God’s Name and the promotion
of Christ’s Kingdom? We have, moreover, been on the verge of civil
war; and the very possibility of such war is proof enough, on the
principles we have been considering, that some of the passions which
lead to all wars have been rife among us. The possibility of that
intestine war seems, in fact, to have been one of the considerations
which encouraged the present attack upon us. Add to all this the social
and personal vices, against which good men among us and great societies
have been struggling for years, and have we not abundant reason to
apply earnestly to our nation and to our individual selves the Lord’s
warning: “Repent, or ye shall likewise perish?” For my part, I could
wish that we were afforded an opportunity, by some solemn appointment
of a Day of National Humiliation as well as Intercession, to search
our consciences in the sight of God, and to unite in one great act
of national repentance. But let us at least endeavour to discharge
this duty of repentance and amendment for our own souls and in our
individual lives; and we may then be assured that we are doing the best
we can towards averting from our nation that suffering and ruin, which
are brought so closely home to us in the miseries of our Allies.
THE RIGHTEOUS IDEAL.
AT CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, SEPTUAGESIMA SUNDAY, 1915.
“_Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly,
nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the
scornful. But his delight is in the law of the Lord: and in his law
doth he meditate day and night._”--Ps. i. 12.
It is with the utmost appropriateness that this psalm is placed first
in the Psalter, for it expresses the spirit which underlies all other
psalms, and, in fact, the whole of the Scriptures. Its message lies,
indeed, at the root of the religion of the Old Testament, and of the
New Testament also. Let us notice, in the first place, that its opening
word--the word “blessed”--is the keynote of the Scriptures from first
to last. In the first chapter of Genesis, which we have read this
morning, we read, not only that God saw everything that He had made,
and behold it was very good; but more particularly, that when God made
man He blessed them, and gave them a special commission. He placed
them in the Garden of Eden, in which He made to grow every tree that
is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the Tree of Life also in
the midst of the Garden. He blessed them, and intended them to be
blessed; and He gave them a command which they had only to obey in
order to enjoy that blessing. Man forfeited the blessing by disobeying
the command; but the last chapter of the Bible, which we have read this
evening, describes the recovery of it by those who have faithfully
served Him. It describes a day when there shall be no more curse, but
the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in the new Garden of the
Tree of Life. “The throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and
His servants shall serve Him; and they shall see His face; and His name
shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and
they need no light of lamp, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God
giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.” Thus the
Bible holds out, from beginning to end, the prospect of blessedness, or
perfect happiness, as that which God designs for men, and which will be
ultimately bestowed upon His faithful servants. Between the beginning
and the end, in the midst of this great dispensation, when our Lord
appeared with His new covenant, His message is described as a Gospel,
as “good tidings of great joy,” and the first word He utters in that
great Sermon on the Mount, which contains his special teaching, is this
characteristic word “blessed.” He repeats it again and again, “Blessed
be ye poor.... Blessed are ye that hunger now.... Blessed are ye that
weep.” The promise of blessing is thus the keynote of our Saviour’s
message.
Now this characteristic of the Bible and of our Saviour’s teaching
explains, and in great degree justifies, the universal craving of
men and women for happiness. The pursuit of happiness in one form or
another is the most universal motive of human conduct. It inspires some
of our best exertions, and it prompts most of our sins. The motive
of our first mother, as described in the third chapter of Genesis,
is still that of nearly all of us, in one way or another. “When the
woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant
to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of
the fruit thereof and did eat.” The world, the flesh, and the devil
are perpetually offering men fruits of this kind, and the craving for
the happiness they promise is so great that men and women seize them,
in spite of the knowledge they have in their consciences that to do
so is wrong and against the will of God. In daily life we find that
different fruits--forbidden fruits--appeal to different classes of men
and women, but they are all liable to be attracted by some fruit or
other and to be possessed by some “ruling passion.” It is striking,
moreover, to look at the course of history, and observe how different
fruits, different ideals, have attracted the various nations of the
world. To the Greek the attraction was that of beauty and art, and
their temptation was to give themselves up to the pleasures which
those ideals could afford them, with but little moral restraint.
The fruit which most attracted the Roman mind was that of rule and
power. The passion, indeed, for creating great empires has been
one of the strongest in mankind. We see it in full strength in the
great Assyrian and Babylonian empires, and, unhappily, we see it in
full force in a great nation of the present day. These pleasures and
glories have accordingly been the subject of a vast amount of human
literature--poetry, and history, and song.
But the characteristic of the people of Israel, and of Jewish
literature, is that none of these ideals of happiness, whether of
beauty or glory or power, have animated their best representatives. The
one ideal which was always before the minds of their great prophets,
and poets, and teachers was the ideal of righteousness, the ideal of
the law of God, which is the subject of this first Psalm. The truth,
with which the Book of Genesis opens, that God has given a law to
men, that He has declared His will to them, and given them statutes
and commandments in which that will is expressed--this is the supreme
thought in the mind of the Jewish Psalmist or prophet, and, in spite
of all their faults, of the Jewish nation as a whole. Psalm cxix.
is, perhaps, the fullest expression of this conviction and passion.
That psalm is one long variation of its opening verse, “Blessed are
they that are undefiled in the way, and walk in the law of the Lord.
Blessed are they that keep His testimonies, and seek Him with their
whole heart.” “O how love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day.”
“How sweet are Thy words unto my taste! yea, sweeter than honey to
my mouth! Through Thy precepts I get understanding, therefore I hate
every false way.” You will see that these phrases express a positive
passion in the mind of the Psalmist for the law of God--as strong a
passion at least, or even stronger, than the passions of some men for
the pleasures of sense, and of others for the pleasures of ambition and
worldly success. “I opened my mouth,” says the Psalmist, “and drew in
my breath, for my delight was in Thy commandments.” The whole frame of
the man, his body as well as his mind, is absorbed in this passion for
the law of God. The Jew craves for blessing, or for happiness, as much
as the Greek or the Roman, but he seeks that blessing in the knowledge
and obedience of the law of God. He knows it is to be found in the way
of righteousness and nowhere else. Thus the first Psalm is a fitting
introduction to all the rest. “His delight,” it says, “is in the law
of the Lord; and in His law doth he meditate day and night. And he
shall be like a tree planted by the waterside, that will bring forth
his fruit in due season. His leaf also shall not wither; and look,
whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper.” This psalm, in short, embodies
the very essence of the belief of the true Jew, which is that the law
of God and the righteousness of God are the one source of all happiness
and blessedness, and that the highest privilege of men and women is
to give themselves up, body and soul, to the pursuit of the happiness
which is there to be found.
I think we shall all recognize that the tendency of men and women
is, for the most part, too different from this. They may wish to do
right and to avoid wrong, but it is comparatively rare for the supreme
passion of their lives to be the pursuit of righteousness, and for
the supreme love of their lives to be for the law of God. Is it not
our general tendency to pursue our own objects, to seek enjoyment,
and happiness, and success in our own ways, and to regard the law of
God, and the principles of righteousness, as a controlling power, an
external authority, which checks us when we are in danger of going
wrong and so far guides us? but the love of it, and the longing for
obedience to it, is too rarely the main motive of our lives. That is
the characteristic of those whom we regard as Saints, but it is not, I
fear, the characteristic of the mass of men and women. This, however,
is the ideal put before us, throughout the Scriptures, as that which
ought to be predominant in our hearts and lives. “Thou shalt love
the Lord thy God,” says Moses, “with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy might.” “This,” said our Lord, “is the great
commandment.” “Blessed,” according to this Psalm, “is the man whose
delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law doth he meditate day
and night.” It is not enough for such a man not to do wrong; his whole
soul is absorbed in the passion for doing what is right. He believes
that the law of God has set before him a great ideal, a vision of the
perfection of human nature; and his great craving is to realize that
ideal and to be what God intended him to be. He knows that all blessing
is to be found in that law and in those visions of perfection, and he
pursues them with his whole heart.
This spirit of the godly man is associated with another aspect of
the same truth which is ever present in the Bible, and which is very
imperfectly realized among men in general. We are apt to be satisfied
with recognizing right and wrong as one of the many elements with which
we are concerned in life. Life is a vast scene of innumerable passions,
and interests, and pleasures, and schemes--personal, social, political,
and imperial; and nearly all of us recognize, no doubt, that right and
wrong, righteousness and justice, have a momentous place among these
various energies and interests; but in the light of the Bible, and in
the teaching of our Lord, that is a very imperfect view to take of
their position. There, right and wrong, righteousness and justice, are
supreme over all other interests; they are the foundation on which
the whole edifice of life is built up; or they are, as it were, the
very cement by which the whole is held together. As the history of the
Jewish people is told in the Bible, every event in their career is
shown to turn on the question of their righteousness or wickedness.
God’s one object is to educate them to be a righteous nation, to keep
His commandments, and statutes, and judgments, so that they may realize
His great design for them. They suffer punishment, such as invasion
by enemies, or captivity by Assyria or Rome, not merely because of
the ambition of those nations, and of their own comparative weakness,
but because they were becoming faithless to the law of God, and not
living for His honour and glory. All that the world, and the worldly
historian, might see of them was that they had provoked the Assyrian
or Roman monarch by some act of self-assertion and pride, and that
he avenged himself by invading and desolating their country. But the
prophetical men who wrote the Books of Kings, and other historical
Books of the Old Testament, went behind this immediate cause, and
saw that it was by the providence of God that the people were thus
punished, because they had forgotten the God of their fathers, and
were ceasing to serve Him. They were inspired to see this element of
righteousness, and of the law of the Lord, as the most essential in
the whole history, and asserting itself continually under the control
of God’s providence.
I venture to think we might illustrate the matter by an example from
modern science. We know now that the most important and universal
force in nature is that of which one of the most familiar forms is
electricity. We know that its influence in the form of light and
magnetism pervades the whole of nature; we know that the very movements
of our limbs, of our hands and fingers, are dependent upon it, that
this is the force which animates our nerves and through them controls
our whole bodies. We know that the element in which it works--the
ether--pervades the whole universe, and that the light which flashes
from stars hundreds of millions of miles away is due to this subtle
force. And yet until less than a hundred years ago men hardly realized
its existence. It was an unseen force, which worked behind all other
forces, and even men of science had but a dim appreciation of it. So it
was with this supreme force of righteousness, until it was brought into
full light by the revelation of the prophets and of our Lord and His
Apostles. What they revealed to us, what the Bible is teaching in every
page, what our Lord, above all, impresses on us with supreme force, is
that God’s righteousness is like the ethereal fluid, which is at once
the illuminating agent and the motive force of all human life. It is
quiet for the most part, and men hardly observe it; but on a sudden it
bursts out into some great storm, like that which startled the author
of Psalm xxix. “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God of
glory thundereth: the Lord is upon many waters.” We see the flash of
the lightning of righteousness, and hear the crash of its thunder. “The
voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire. The voice of the Lord
shaketh the wilderness.” That is the meaning, no doubt, of a great war
like the present. Some evil had been accumulating, some passions of
ambition and greed, some failures in duty, some defections from truth,
faults of one kind in one nation, and sad failures of duty in another,
and, on a sudden, some spark lights an explosion, and the whole world
is ablaze with flames of fire. So it is also in our private lives. We
may go on for a long time yielding to weaknesses, or even sins, and
righteousness may seem to be silent, the voice of conscience may seem
to be a mere voice and not to be asserting its supremacy; but, on a
sudden, or after a long and gradual accumulation of wrong-doing, God
asserts His law, our neglect of righteousness finds us out, and God’s
justice is vindicated upon us.
These considerations ought to lead to a deeper devotion to those
principles of right and wrong, and to that supreme vision of
righteousness which the Bible and our Lord and His Apostles impress
upon us; but I would add that it is the great message we should take
home to ourselves, not merely in our individual lives, but in our
national life. We see before us a great nation, endowed with some of
the highest capacities of human nature, allowing itself to be absorbed
more and more, year by year, by a great passion for power and dominion
and supremacy in the world. This passion has taken such hold on it
that it thinks itself justified in over-riding and defying the laws
of truth and justice and mercy, even in the imperfect form in which
they have been formally recognized in the law of nations. Everything,
we are told, must yield to the demands of a nation which believes that
a certain supremacy in the world is necessary for it. The consequence
is that the air has to be cleared by this awful outburst of national
thunder and lightning. But let us apply the danger and the lesson to
ourselves. What is our own ideal as a nation and as an empire? Perhaps
we too have been in danger of being fascinated too much by that vision
of empire. It is a legitimate ideal when applied to right purposes,
and subject to the right control; but those purposes must be those of
Divine righteousness, and the control is the control of the law of
God. If we make it the main object of every power with which God has
entrusted us to promote His laws, to support and to spread further the
Kingdom of His Christ, to do righteousness and justice in the world, so
far as our power and influence reaches; if for that purpose we strive
to ensure that all our legislation, and all our imperial and national
action, is deliberately and constantly directed to the support and
extension of the law of God and of Christ, then we may hope for God’s
blessing on our achievements, and may trust to be preserved from those
perversions of national spirit, and from that military and arbitrary
passion, against which we have at this moment to maintain so desperate
a struggle. Let us strive after this great object, alike in ourselves,
in our country, and throughout our Empire, and then we may hope that as
a nation we may be, in the Psalmist’s words, “like a tree planted by
the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,” and
that whatsoever we do may prosper. In a word, as a nation no less than
as individuals, let our delight be in the law of the Lord, and in His
law let us meditate day and night.
REASONS FOR INTERCESSION.
CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL: DAY OF SPECIAL INTERCESSION FOR THE WAR, JUNE 17,
1915.
“_The heathen make much ado, and the kingdoms are moved: but God hath
shewed His voice, and the earth shall melt away._”--Ps. xlvi. 6.
We are come here this evening to offer our earnest prayers and
supplications to God for His help in this grievous and dangerous crisis
of our national life, to entreat Him to grant the victory to our King
and his Allies, and to deliver our nation, our Empire, and the world
from the violence and oppression with which they are threatened by the
enemy. In order that we may do so aright, it is necessary we should
realize distinctly what is God’s special concern with the war, and
what is our own relation to Him in respect to it. Now, the one supreme
truth which I would urge upon you this evening is that the war, as a
whole--its origin, its course, its end, and its purpose--is in the
hands of God, and that we must look to Him, and to Him alone, for our
guidance in it, and our deliverance from it. I fear we are too much
disposed to think of the natural causes of the war, of the natural
means we have of conducting it, and of the human and physical forces
which are engaged in it; while we think of God as standing outside the
struggle, and appeal to Him to interfere in it, as we might appeal to
some great human power, in our extremity. We are too much disposed
to act and think as if the result depended entirely on the number of
men we can put in the field, upon the munitions of war we can obtain,
the guns and the shells and the other physical means we can bring
into action. It is true that these thing--men and the munitions of
war--are the indispensable instruments of success and victory. Even
in times when God interfered miraculously, He required His people, as
under Joshua and David, to put forth their full strength, and to make
the utmost sacrifices for their cause. But the main lesson which is
inculcated in the Scriptures respecting war is that it is one of God’s
great agencies for carrying out His will and accomplishing His own
purposes, and that its issue is in all cases absolutely in His hands.
It is He Who permits war; it is He Who in the exercise of His righteous
judgment, occasions war; it is He Who alone can determine the issue of
war; and it is His purposes, and not ours, which are brought to pass by
war.
If, in fact, we would apprehend our position and the position of our
Empire and of Europe in this war, we must in spirit see God upon His
throne, permitting by His judgment the fierce passions of war to break
forth, and controlling the whole course of the tremendous storms they
involve by His justice and His will. As the Psalmist says, “The Lord
reigneth, be the people never so impatient, He sitteth between the
Cherubim, be the earth never so unquiet.” Or, again, “The Lord is King,
the earth may be glad thereof; yea, the multitude of the isles may be
glad thereof: Clouds and darkness are round about Him, righteousness
and judgment are the habitation of His seat. There shall go a fire
before Him and burn up His enemies on every side. His lightnings gave
shine unto the world: the earth saw it and was afraid.” That might
be taken for a picture of war with the thunders and lightnings of its
“red artillery.” Let us, if we would turn this occasion to due account,
look up for a while from the human thunders and lightnings by which
the earth and sea are now shaken; let us raise our eyes and our hearts
to the Psalmist’s vision of God sitting on His throne, above all these
earthly and human struggles and sufferings, and though clouds and
darkness are round about Him, yet controlling them by His righteous
judgment.
Let us look into this general consideration a little more particularly.
War is the result of human passion, human error, and human sin. If
only men were unselfish, wise, and true, there would be no occasion
for the struggles from which it springs; but instead of that they are
covetous, foolish, and blind, and God has so constituted mankind that
the ultimate appeal of these passions and follies must be made to
force; and in the ordinary course of His providence He leaves them to
make that appeal. He lets their passions work themselves out to their
natural results, and so bring their own punishment upon themselves.
If, indeed, men sought His guidance and grace in all humility and
earnestness before war broke out, we may be confident He would guide
and control them; but the very danger of their pride and their passion
is that it makes them forget Him, and then He suffers them to find
their need of Him by leaving them to bear the consequences. But
when those consequences have broken out into war, they are then, in
the most absolute degree, subject to His over-ruling hand. It is an
essential characteristic of war that it sets forces loose which are
beyond calculation, and beyond human control. Ordinary ways of action
are suspended, and we become subject to the most unexpected and most
incalculable influences. We are beginning to see it ourselves in the
present war. We are forced to resort to public measures which all
confess to be absolutely unprecedented; and the whole world, old and
new, is immersed in dangers and disorders never before dreamed of. But
when men and nations are in this tumult and disorder and blindness,
then they realize, as they too often fail to do in quiet times,
that they are absolutely dependent on God. He has at His command
infinite natural and spiritual forces by which the result of a war
or a battle can be determined. As in the famous battle of Joshua, or
in the destruction of the Spanish Armada in our own history, storms
and tempests, or a mere turn in the weather, or it may be added, the
invisible interposition of some angelic agent, may defeat all human
schemes and determine the issue of a battle, and, through a battle,
the fate of an Empire. Of great commanders, moreover, no less than of
kings, the words of our Collect are true, that their hearts are in
God’s rule and governance, and that He disposes and turns them as it
seems best to His godly wisdom.
The message of the Bible, in fact, from first to last, the message of
Jewish history, and the message of the Psalms, is that God is in a
pre-eminent degree the “Lord of war,” with Whom it lies to bring on
men the judgment of war, to control war, and to make wars to cease.
“O come hither,” says the Psalm of my text, “behold the works of the
Lord, what destruction He hath brought upon the earth. He maketh wars
to cease in all the world, he breaketh the bow, and knappeth the spear
in sunder, and burneth the chariots in the fire. Be still, then, and
know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen and I will be
exalted in the earth.” Or, as it is expressed in another Psalm, “There
is no king that can be saved by the multitude of an host, neither is
any mighty man delivered by much strength. A horse is counted but a
vain thing to save a man, neither shall he deliver any man by his great
strength. Behold the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear Him, upon
them that put their trust in His mercy.” Or, once more, “We have heard
with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what Thou hast done in
their time of old; How Thou hast driven out the heathen with Thy hand,
and planted them in; how Thou hast destroyed the nations and cast them
out. For they gat not the land in possession through their own sword;
neither was it their own arm that helped them; but Thy right hand and
Thine arm, and the light of Thy countenance, because Thou hadst a
favour unto them.”
The first conviction, then, with which we should come before God to-day
is that, although the utmost efforts on our part are required, still,
when we have used the last ounce of our strength, and made the last
sacrifice of life and limb, we are absolutely dependent for the issue
upon the will, the power, and the over-ruling providence of God. We
are bound to fall at His feet as His helpless creatures, absolutely
dependent on His hand. We are bound to recognize that the wealth and
power we enjoy, the great position which this Empire occupies in the
world, have been gifts from Him, and that we gat not this possession
by our own sword; neither was it our own arm that helped us; but God’s
right hand and God’s arm, and the light of His countenance, because He
had a favour towards us, for some great purposes of His own.
But what were those purposes? If we feel that we are thus the
instruments of God’s hand, to be used as He pleases, we must needs
ask, with anxious earnestness, What are His great purposes? and can we
know whether we are acting in accordance with them? We know that we
are not in the hands of an arbitrary power or an unreasoning will. We
know that whatever God does is done with reason and justice and love.
Here, again, it is our privilege to have revealed to us, in God’s Word,
the great purposes for which He is working. His methods and His ways
of carrying His purposes out are beyond our comprehension, but He has
graciously told us what those purposes are. Their great object is the
manifestation of His glory, His truth, His love, to be the light, the
salvation, the infinite happiness of man. That was the object of the
whole of His work in establishing the people of Israel in their land,
in protecting them, in bringing punishments upon them, in delivering
them from their enemies, or allowing them to fall into captivity. By
means of them--through their history, their Prophets, their Psalmists,
and their Kings--He made known that grand revelation of Himself which
is recorded in our Bibles. All these acts were done, and their memory
is preserved, in order that all the world might see and learn that
in knowledge of Him, in obedience to Him, in love to Him and prayer
to Him, is life and health, in body and soul, in this world and in
the next. Let us be assured that that remains His purpose, and the
guiding rule of His providence, throughout all history, and in our
own, to the present day. If God has given us wealth, and strength, and
prosperity, and imperial power, we may be sure that it is in order that
we may be His instruments for the spread of His Kingdom, for bringing
the knowledge of Christ and of Christ’s salvation to the ends of the
earth, that the love of Christ, the example of Christ, the law of
Christ may be established throughout the world. Do not let us suppose
that there is any other object whatever in God’s dispensations. The
manifestation of God in Christ, and the bringing of all human souls,
all human life, into harmony with it, into the full enjoyment of it,
and consequently into perfect obedience to His will--this is the end of
all the struggles, of all the wars, of all the sufferings of mankind,
mysterious as they are, and utterly baffling to our feeble apprehension.
There is surely an infinite comfort in realizing this great revelation.
If we grasp the assurance that this is the sure and certain end
of God’s dispensations, we can bear with patience, and even with
thankfulness, the sufferings and sorrows through which they are worked
out. While we bitterly mourn the loss of those who are sacrificed in
such a war as this, we can feel that they have laid down their lives
in the eternal battle in which Christ is the Commander, and in which
we are all taking part, and that we remain one with them, and they one
with us, in serving Christ and asserting the will of God.
One army of the Living God,
To His command we bow,
Part of the host have crossed the flood,
And part are crossing now,
or will be crossing soon. Only let us take care, if we are to have the
reward, hereafter, of having served in this great army, that we are
working, fighting, dying, and suffering bereavement, in the cause of
this great Commander and in accordance with His will.
But if these are the purposes with which God has directed all history,
and controls all wars, we cannot dare to come before Him, and ask for
His help, unless the spirit in which we are joining in this war is
in harmony with His, and unless we mean, with His help, to act and
fight in entire devotion to Him, and in obedience to Christ. If we
fought merely to gain victory, to assert the supremacy of our Empire,
to establish our superiority over other nations, we could not expect
His countenance and help, and we should be affronting His Majesty and
His Holiness by asking for it; but these are not our aims. They are,
it appears, in the main, those of our enemy, and for that reason we
may be confident that God’s face will be against them. But, so far as
we are fighting for a kingdom and an Empire which acknowledges in all
things the sovereignty of our Lord Jesus Christ, which endeavours to
act, to govern, and to serve in accordance with His will, and which
will promote and protect the spread of His Kingdom--so far as we are
conscious in our consciences that that is our aim--we may confidently
come before Him and appeal to Him to help us with His right hand and
His holy arm. But we cannot thus serve Him and obey Him as a nation
unless we obey and serve Him in our own individual lives; and when
we kneel, therefore, before Him to-day we are called upon to pledge
ourselves, with the utmost sincerity and earnestness, to give our
hearts and wills and lives up to Him in all things, with greater truth
and singleness of heart than we have ever yet realized.
If we look candidly into the recent life of our nation, it must, I
fear, be acknowledged that we have in many respects grievously failed
in this Christian spirit. The habits of our people have in too many
respects declined from the Christian standard which was set us by our
forefathers in their best days. The worship and service of God and
Christ have not been held so high among us as the supreme duty of life.
We see it in the increasing neglect of the public worship of God, in
a less general piety of life, in a growing disposition to acquiesce
in standards of action which are not in all respects those of the New
Testament; in the failure to look to the authority of Christ and His
Apostles as the supreme rule in all the relations of life, in the
relations of men and women, in the ideals of domestic and private life.
We have lived too much for this life and too little for the next. We
have cared too much for time and too little for eternity. We shall not
be able to fulfil the purposes of God for our nation and for the world
unless we amend our lives in these respects, unless we humbly confess
our failure before Him, and set ourselves resolutely to live more
Christian lives in the future. If we kneel before Him this evening in
this spirit of confession for the past, and of heartfelt devotion for
the future, we may come boldly to His throne of grace; and we may be
thankful to be assured that our country and our country’s cause, and
the welfare of all who are dear to us, here and hereafter, are in His
hands. You are invited to begin your supplication this evening with
that penitential Psalm, in which David confessed from the bottom of his
heart his own grievous sin, but was also inspired by God’s Holy Spirit
to seek comfort and regeneration, righteousness and peace. That is the
spirit in which we should approach God at all times, but especially
in a time of sore trial like the present; and if we do so, we may
confidently join in the concluding petition, in which the Psalmist
beseeches God’s blessing upon His nation. “The sacrifice of God is
a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt Thou
not despise. O be favourable and gracious unto Zion; build Thou the
walls of Jerusalem. Then shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifice of
righteousness,” with the devoted offerings and service of a regenerated
and Christian nation. God grant it, for Christ’s sake.
THE ETERNAL SOURCE OF GOODNESS.
PREACHED AT HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, MARGATE, NOVEMBER 7, 1915.
“_Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh
down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither
shadow of turning._”--St. James i. 17.
In these words a singularly vivid picture is set before us. God is
represented to us as the Sun in the Heavens, from Whom light and warmth
are perpetually streaming. The text does not merely say that all good
gifts come from above and that none but good gifts come from thence.
It means also that those good gifts are perpetually being poured upon
us, just as light and heat are perpetually flowing from the sun. But
it points out one great difference between the physical sun and this
Divine source of grace and glory. The sun and the other lights of the
heavens which are dependent upon it are all liable to be obscured or
eclipsed. They are “subject to variableness and shadow of turning,”
that is, to the shadows occasioned by their turning in their daily
revolutions, so that daylight is succeeded by the darkness of night,
and the moon waxes and wanes. But the light of the Divine glory and
grace is never thus obscured from us. It is perpetually shining, and
we can enjoy its blessed influence at every moment. God is the Father
of Lights--the Father of Light of all kinds; and all grace and truth
are perpetually proceeding from Him. “Every good gift and every perfect
boon is from above,” coming down continually from “the Father of Lights
with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” This is the
great truth which is embodied in the beautiful words of the Collect
just used, “Lord of all power and might Who art the Author and Giver of
all good things.”
This is the first grand truth which is revealed to us by our Christian
faith. It is involved in the revelation of God to us as our Father in
Heaven, and it is impressed on us in the Sermon on the Mount, when our
Lord bids us live as “the children of our Father which is in Heaven:
Who maketh the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth
rain on the just and on the unjust.” It would be well for us to realize
this more fully and constantly. We see the sun in the Heavens; we are
sensible of its lifegiving influences day by day; but we do not always
have so vividly before us the Supreme Sun of the spiritual Heavens,
and we are tempted to live without the constant realization of His
presence. There are, indeed, experiences which are a great trial to our
faith in this constant Presence, and which even make men and women ask
themselves in perplexity whether there can be, in reality, any such
perpetually Divine source of all good things--whether any Divine Power
is really at all times pouring the best blessing upon mankind. What is
the meaning, for instance, many anxious hearts have asked themselves
at a time like this--what is the meaning and the explanation of such
fearful miseries as the world is now suffering through the present war?
Can it be a God from Whom all good things are perpetually coming Who
permits half the world to fall into such distresses and agonies as we
have heard of lately, and are daily hearing? The evil in the world has
at all times been a perplexity to faith, and when manifested on such a
tremendous scale, when it rises before us in the monstrous form of an
awful war, the question presses upon our hearts and minds with painful
force. But the privilege of the Christian is to maintain through all
these distresses the proclamation that the love of God, the goodness
of God, the mercy of God, the blessing of God are still at work,
notwithstanding the clouds with which they seem obscured. Clouds and
darkness may be round about Him, but righteousness and judgment are the
habitation of His throne.
The general explanation of this great mystery is that these sufferings
are the means by which God asserts the supremacy of righteousness and
truth. He has so ordered the world that unrighteousness, ungodliness,
untruth, immorality of all kinds inevitably punish themselves by
leading to appeals to force, and so provoke the wars and fightings
of which St. James speaks in this Epistle. “From whence,” he says,
“come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your
lusts, that war in your members? Ye lust and have not; ye kill, and
desire to have and cannot obtain”--can there be a truer description,
in brief, of the origin of the present war? These are God’s judgments,
in which He so orders the world that nations and individuals punish
themselves for their indulgence in covetous and unbridled passions.
They will not submit to be checked by conscience or by reason, and
therefore God leaves them to the natural consequences of their mutual
lusts and violences. In fact, the miseries of war are a conspicuous
instance of the great truth that good things are always coming from
God. Vengeance for evil is a good thing; and the punishment, even
the bitter punishment, of selfishness, whether in individuals or in
national life, the severest punishments of covetousness, arrogance,
forgetfulness of God, disobedience to Christ--these punishments are
good things; and if God is chastising Europe for such sins, and
ourselves in no small measure, He is doing it at once in judgment and
in mercy. It is a warning to every nation, and to every man and woman,
to consider in what respect they have been failing in their duty to God
and to Christ, to their neighbour, and even to themselves, and to pray
God to open their eyes and enable them to repent and amend. What we see
before us in a convulsion like this, is the outburst of the lightnings
and thunders of righteous judgment, and if it brings men to their knees
in penitence and amendment of life, it may prove one of God’s greatest
blessings to the world.
We may understand this the better if we consider, more particularly,
the means by which God is always pouring upon the world those blessed
influences of goodness and righteousness of which the text and the
Collect speak. They tell us that He is like the sun in the heavens
pouring His bright beams upon us and the world at large. Where is that
Sun? It is in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, in all His words
and deeds, and in those Scriptures which, as He said, testify of Him.
The answer is contained in the truth that “God, Who, at sundry times
and in divers manners spake in times past unto the fathers, by the
prophets, hath in these last days spoken unto us by His Son, Who is
the brightness of His glory and the express image of His Person.” “No
man,” we are told, “hath seen God at any time. The only begotten Son
Who is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him.” He declares
Him in various ways. In the first place, the grace and truth and glory
of God are seen in the Face of Jesus Christ, in His life as recorded
in the Gospels, and in His words. “He that hath seen me,” said our
Saviour Himself, “hath seen the Father.” It is God Himself Who is seen
in every act and word of Jesus Christ, and if we want to know God, to
realize His character and His will, we have only to study the life and
words of our Lord, and we see it all in vivid human features. God in
Christ is as visible to the eyes of our hearts and minds as the sun in
the heavens. As the physical sun is visible to every human eye, so the
sun of the spiritual world--God Himself--is visible to every human mind
in the person of our Lord. This comparison is as old as the Psalms.
“The heavens,” says the 19th Psalm, “declare the glory of God, and the
firmament sheweth His handiwork,” and then it proceeds, “the law of
the Lord is perfect, converting the soul, the testimony of the Lord
is sure, making wise the simple.” The law of the Lord of which the
Psalmist spoke was that revelation of the Will of God which was given
to the Jews at sundry times and in divers manners, and is recorded
in the ancient Scriptures. But that law is now summed up, explained,
enlarged, and perfected in the face of Jesus Christ, and in His words.
In Him is God to be seen. In Him is the source of the highest moral and
spiritual goodness.
The Collect goes on to pray “Graft in our hearts the love of Thy Name,
increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness.” The Name
of God means the character of God, and if we are to love character we
must see it, and we can see it in Jesus Christ and nowhere else. If
you wish to love God, you must learn to love Jesus Christ. To love God
is to love righteousness, truth, and goodness, and in Jesus Christ we
see them in life and in human reality. Righteousness, goodness, truth,
purity, grace, may be loved, indeed, in the abstract; but the love
for them must be infinitely deepened if we see them concentrated in a
living person, so that the love of them is identified with the love of
Him. If, in fact, we would keep the love of these great things alive
in our hearts, if we would continually deepen it, if we would have
the eyes of our minds and hearts opened more and more, the supreme
necessity is that we should learn more and more of Jesus Christ, live
with Him by constant study of His deeds and words, and so open our
souls to the impress of His grace and truth. The history of the world
since He lived and died is the sufficient proof of this fact. The
Christian Church, which is charged with the duty and the privilege of
living in His spirit and working in His name, has, notwithstanding many
failures and faults, held up before the world the highest standard
of goodness and truth. There is no more conspicuous illustration of
this influence of Christ and His Church than the fact that the noble
Societies which, by their devoted care of the wounded, now mitigate the
horrors of war, are called “Red Cross” Societies, and were founded and
maintained in obedience to the spirit of Christ. Since Christ came,
it is through Him that all these good things do come, and if we would
enjoy them we must live and work in His light.
But this is far from being the sole means by which Christ is the source
of all good things. He promised His disciples before He died, that He
would send the Holy Spirit into the world Who should bring to their
remembrance all things that He had told them, and should be to them and
to their followers an adviser and comforter, such as He had Himself
been while He was with them--Who should convince them of sin, of
righteousness and judgment--teach them, that is, what sin is, and what
righteousness is, and bring home to them the nature of the judgment of
God. He formed them into a Society, to be a perpetual witness of Him to
the world; and He established two ceremonies (which we call Sacraments)
to be a perpetual pledge to His followers of His love and of His grace,
and to be a special means by which that grace should be bestowed on
them; so that the source of this Divine illumination and bounty is not
merely Christ in the past, in His life on earth, as we read of Him in
the words of the New Testament, but Christ living and working in His
Church by means of those words, and by means of the Sacraments which
testify of them and bring them home to every individual soul. The
words of Christ and the Sacraments of Christ are means which can be
seen and handled, by which the grace of God is manifested and conveyed
to us.
Moreover, He has told us, as I have mentioned, that the Old Testament
throughout, the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, speak of Him,
reveal His character and His Will. To the Jews, who had only the Old
Testament, He said, “Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye
have eternal life, and they are they which testify of Me.” Combined,
these are the visible, tangible, and audible instruments by which the
“Lord of all power and might, the Author and Giver of all good things,”
shines into our hearts and speaks to our inmost souls. There are,
indeed, and always have been, other influences in the world by which
goodness and truth are impressed upon us; and there are, and always
have been, many gracious human influences by which they are upheld in
our hearts and in the world at large; but these are all imperfect,
and liable to perversion, in comparison with the influence of Jesus
Christ and His Church and the Holy Scriptures; and we can never be
sure of their being kept true and unperverted, except so far as they
are brought to the test, and subjected to the influences, through the
Person of Jesus Christ and of His words in the Holy Scriptures, of that
Lord of all power and might from whom all good things do come.
These considerations may help to explain to us the source of the evils
which have plunged Europe into its present convulsions and they will
be the best guide to ourselves for our own action in the present and
the future. It is, unhappily, an unquestionable matter of fact that a
great part of Europe, and especially of Germany, has lost sight for a
generation or two of that Sun of Righteousness, Who is the Author and
Giver of all good things. They have rejected the authority of Christ,
and denied the Divine reality of the revelation of God’s will in the
Old Testament. The consequence is that they have deprived themselves
of the influences of that Divine light, and have been setting up
standards of right and wrong in national and individual life, which
are inconsistent with it. Some of the best instincts of a strong and
manly nation have consequently been perverted. National ideals have
been pursued which are inconsistent with Christian civilization, and
men have been driven by these perverted instincts and passions into the
hell of war. We may be sure that Europe will not again enjoy permanent
peace until, by the merciful correction of that Lord from Whom all good
things do come, the love of His Name has again been grafted in their
hearts, and the true religion of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ
revived and increased.
But it becomes us to apply to ourselves, very seriously, the same
considerations. Must we not admit that among ourselves also a similar
disregard of the only source from Whom all good things do come has
been sadly and increasingly prevalent of late years, and perhaps for a
generation or two past? What is the meaning of the acknowledged falling
off in attendance at Divine Worship, of the increasing disuse of family
Prayers, and of the daily reading of Scripture in the family, and of
the less distinctively Christian tone of much of our literature and
of our stage? Let us put it to our own consciences whether we live,
as we ought, in the constant sense that it is only in the word of God
and of Christ, as contained in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments, in constant subjection to His word and to the influences
of His Spirit, that we can be sure of finding the true light to our
paths, and a rod and a staff to comfort us amidst the temptations and
perplexities of the world? Do we live under the constant influences of
the Scriptures, and of the ordinances and Sacraments of Christ? If not,
it can only be because we do not believe the blessed assurances of this
text, and of our Church’s Collect. Unless men and women are blinded for
the time by the influence of some strong passions, or of some perverted
teaching, could they fail to submit themselves day by day to the Lord,
from Whom all good things do come, so that those good and gracious
things may sink more and more deeply into their souls, mould their
characters, and guide them more and more into the way that leadeth to
everlasting life? Men will travel far to sunny lands for the healing
influences of this world’s sun upon their bodily health. Can they
fail, if they realize the blessing offered them day by day, to seek the
companionship of the Lord Jesus Christ and His Father, for the sake of
their spiritual health in this world and in the next?
Let us then, in the first place, be led back by these present trials
and agonies to the only source of all truth and light for this world
and the next, to the words which God spake “in sundry times and in
divers manners,” in ages past, and above all, to those which He spake
by His Son, the brightness of His glory and the express image of His
Person; and if we feel their supreme preciousness for ourselves, let
us do everything in our power to promote and spread those sacred
words and that divine light throughout the world, as you are asked to
help in doing this morning. Here lies the only hope for ourselves,
the only hope for our people at large, for our nation and empire.
Let us henceforth join with a new earnestness in the prayer of the
Collect: “Graft in our hearts the love of Thy Name, increase in us true
religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of Thy great mercy keep us
in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
THE NATIONAL IDEAL.
PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, JANUARY 3rd, 1915.
“_Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded
you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye
may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess._”--Deut. v.
33.
We have been summoned this evening by our King and by the Chief Pastor
of our Church, to a Service of humble prayer and intercession to
Almighty God on behalf of our Nation and Empire now engaged in war;
and in the Form of Humble Prayer in which we have just joined there
is an exhortation explaining and urging upon us the spirit in which
that intercession should be made. In addressing you this evening I
would draw special attention to one point in that exhortation. Before
all else, we are told, we must remember that those who would receive
good at the hands of God must go to Him in humility, with a due sense
of their many faults and continual short-comings in His sight. In
other words, a humble prayer must be before all else a prayer of
humiliation. It is a principle which is impressed upon us every day
in the Exhortation at the beginning of our prayers. “The Scripture,”
we are told, “moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess
our manifold sins and wickednesses; and that we should not dissemble
nor cloke them before the face of Almighty God our Heavenly Father;
but confess them with a humble, lowly, penitent and obedient heart; to
the end that we may obtain forgiveness of the same, by his infinite
goodness and mercy,” and we are surely bound, on an occasion like this,
to take to heart the words which follow, viz., that “although we ought
at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before God: yet ought we
most chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together” as we do
to-day, to implore His special mercy in the greatest crisis which our
nation and Empire has ever had to encounter. If every morning and
evening ought to waken in us a humble, lowly, and penitent confession
of our sins, surely an hour when, as a whole Nation, we are seeking
God’s merciful and gracious help calls for still deeper and humbler
confession of our sins.
There has been, I fear, some reluctance among us to yield ourselves
to this penitent humiliation, and it will be well therefore to remind
ourselves a little of the reasons there are for it. Now the first
and most patent of all the reasons why we should recognize our sins
and wickedness is the bare and ghastly fact of this war in itself.
We are all distressed and grieved by it, and are all saying what a
horrible thing it is that war--and such a war--should be possible in a
Christian Europe. But what we should first of all realize is that it
is a horrible exhibition of the sin and wickedness of human nature.
Just contrast what Europe was a few months ago with the scenes that
are now exhibited in Belgium, France, and Poland. A few months ago,
Europe was a prosperous country, full of wealth, comfort, and enjoyment
of all kinds. Its many millions were engaged in quiet occupations
which employed their energies happily. “They ate, they drank, they
bought, they sold, they planted, they builded.” Fathers and mothers
and children, families young and old, cities and villages were in the
enjoyment of plenty, and full of hope for the future. God had prospered
them, and there was much hope that the wants and sufferings which
were still the lot of too many among them might be gradually removed
by benevolent legislation and mutual help; but, on a sudden, at a few
days’ notice, this scene of happiness, and hope, and well-being is
overthrown as if by an earthquake. Some parts of it are overwhelmed
by “blood and fire and vapour of smoke,” and the whole of it, from
the extreme west of our Isles to the East of Russia, from the Baltic
to the Mediterranean is transformed into a vast Barracks, in which
sons and fathers are torn from their families, leaving behind them
too often the lamentation and mourning of wives and mothers, weeping
for those who are not. The language of the prophet is not too strong
for the occasion “The land was a Garden of Eden and is become a
desolate wilderness.” I ask you, is not such a sudden and disastrous
transformation the most clear proof we could have of some deadly evil
being at work in human nature? What else, but some deadly, inherent
evil could in a few weeks or days blot out all peace in Europe and let
loose a sort of hell in human society and human life. We were proud
of the growth of civilization, and were constructing all sorts of
schemes of social and political development, when, on a sudden, our
civilization explodes, and we find ourselves surrounded by its wrecks
in fire, and ruin, and carnage, and hatred, and violence of all kinds.
All this explosive force of evil must have been there. There must have
been corruptions, and sins, and vices at work which we did not surmise;
and fair as the life of Europe seemed outside, it must really have been
in some respects rotten to the core. This war has not been imposed
upon Europe from without, as it was when the great barbarian invaders
poured over it fourteen hundred years ago. All this horror, and misery,
and bloodshed, and ruin has sprung out of the materials--out of the
civilized materials--provided by Europe itself, and it must be some
internal disease, some original vice and corruption which is revealed
to us in the ghastly spectacle which is now presented by so large a
part of the most favoured lands of the world.
Some one perhaps may be tempted to say that this indictment applies to
the countries which have provoked this war, but not to Europe at large;
but that, I am sure, would be, if not unjust to those countries, at
least not candid with respect to ourselves. Is it not the case that, to
an increasing extent of late years, the civilization of Europe has been
united, and marked in the main by similar characteristics? Have not the
literature and many of the ideas of Germany penetrated the literature
and the thought of France and England? Has there been conspicuous
among us any protest against the habits of thought, the tendencies
of religious belief or unbelief, the luxuries if not the waste of
living, which have prevailed elsewhere? If the life and civilization
of Europe has ended in this great catastrophe, can we honestly stand
aside and claim to be free of all blame, and to have had no share in
the tendencies and evils which have produced so horrible a result?
We shrink from them in their full development, we denounce them, we
resolve to fight against them to the last, and to re-establish sounder
and more Christian principles of public and social life, but dare we
say that we have not dallied with them? Can we honestly claim to have
repudiated them at their source, so as to be free from any part or lot
in sins and errors which have led to so hideous a result? I will not
try to drive such painful questions further home. I will only say that
if we are honest with ourselves, we shall not venture to adopt the
Pharisee’s attitude and exclaim, on a day like this, “God, I thank Thee
that I am not as other men are, or even as this German.” In a word, we
have had some share, at all events, in the tone of thought and life
which has prevailed in Europe for the last two generations, and we
shall be more true to God and to ourselves if we are content, on this
day of humble confession and intercession, simply to exclaim “God be
merciful to me a sinner.”
But confession of sin should be but the first step to amendment of
life, and for the purpose of that amendment we must endeavour to
realize more particularly what the sins are, which in God’s righteous
judgment have brought this misery upon us. Many of them we have
acknowledged in the Litany in which we have joined. We have prayed
for deliverance from those sins wherein as a nation we have grieved
God. We have confessed to pride, boasting, and self-sufficiency, to
covetousness, worldliness, and indifference to the needs of others, to
drunkenness, impurity, and all manner of self-indulgence, to trusting
in our own strength and forgetting God, to want of faith in God, to
want of love to Him and to one another, to a want of charity towards
all men. These are the sins charged upon us by the chief pastors of
our Church, and they constitute surely a grievous catalogue of vices,
sufficient in themselves to account for the failure of the civilization
of which we form a part, and to require us to humiliate ourselves very
deeply before God. We are called upon by the Archbishops not merely
to pray, as we do in our daily Litany, against those evils, but to
acknowledge that they are sins wherein, as a nation, we have grieved
God. Now it must be left to our individual consciences to apply those
grievous confessions to our own hearts and lives. Of some of them,
perhaps, we shall all acknowledge ourselves to have been guilty; and
we are bound to put it earnestly to our hearts and consciences how
far we have individually been guilty of them. But it is not for the
preacher, who is deeply sensible of his own sins, to press such charges
upon others. I would rather adopt this evening the more gracious, and,
I hope, more helpful course of reminding you of the one supreme and
sufficient method by which all such sins, whatever they may have been,
may be overcome, and may be averted for the future.
It is the method and the obligation impressed upon us in the text by
the great Law Giver of Israel when he was laying the foundation of the
Jewish nation. It is instructive to remember that the discourses of
Moses recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy are described as having for
their first and immediate object to lay down the principles on which
the Jewish people could realize the great purpose which God had in view
for them, and could become a strong and prosperous nation. “These,”
said Moses, in the verses following the text, “are the commandments,
and the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord your God commanded
to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to
possess it: that thou mightest fear the Lord Thy God, to keep all His
Statutes and His Commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son,
and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be
prolonged. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it
may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily.” And then he
proceeds to sum up those statutes and judgments in the momentous words
which Our Lord Himself selected as the first and great commandment of
the Law, “Hear O Israel,” said Moses, “The Lord our God is one Lord:
and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy might.” That, in the words of the book
in which our Saviour sought the great principles of His own life, and
which He quoted again and again as laying down eternal truths--that
is the great principle on which a sound moral, religious, and secure
national life must be founded--the principle of loving the Lord our
God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might.
The God Whom the people of Israel were thus called on to love with all
their heart, soul, and might, was the God Who had delivered them out of
Egypt and its bondage, and Who was about to establish them in the land
of Canaan by wonders and signs which could only have been wrought by
His supreme power, and Who, in the most solemn and awful circumstances,
had declared at Mount Sinai the cardinal laws of social and national
life. The God to whom our Saviour applies the principle was His Own
Father, the God Who is seen in His Own words and in His ministry, Whose
will is so graciously explained to us in the records of His life and in
the words of His Apostles, and Whose character, therefore, and will are
clearly and distinctly revealed. Our Lord, when He adopted these words
of Moses, declared to the whole world that in order that they may live,
and that it may be well with them, and that they may prolong their
days in the peace and happiness He designed for them, the one supreme
condition is that they should love the God Who is His Father, with all
their heart, soul, mind, and strength. If they do that, if the whole
of their lives is submitted to His will as revealed by His Son Jesus
Christ, then they will have a supreme authority, a secure guide in
their personal, their family, and their social life; and He adds to the
assurance of Moses the promise of His Holy Spirit to interpret His will
to them and to assist them in their struggles. That is the one and the
sufficient condition for realizing here on earth the blessing of the
peace which God designs for us. Life animated by that love would secure
it--and that alone.
Now the one question it would be well for us to put to ourselves on
this day of confession and self amendment is whether it has not been
the chief wickedness, and the growing wickedness, of Europe at large,
and of ourselves in particular, to fail to make this love of God,
this submission to God and to Christ, the one supreme principle and
inspiration of our whole life, private, social, and public. I would
ask whether religion, as people generally understand it, has not been
allowed to become of late years, in an increasing degree, too much of a
private and personal matter--a matter of individual preference, a part
of a man’s character which could hardly be treated as an absolute duty,
so that a man who did not live a religious life was, as it were, within
his rights, and that he could not be treated as neglecting a supreme
obligation? Has it not been our temptation, as a nation, to legislate
without a supreme regard to this first duty, so as even to allow our
children and the children of the nation to be educated without supreme
regard to it? Has not attendance at Divine Worship been grievously
neglected of late years as a consequence of this growing decay of the
love of God? Have not the words of our Lord and His Apostles been
losing the authority which they used to possess among us, and which
they must possess with all who believe them to be a revelation of the
supreme Will of Almighty God? As a consequence of all this, has there
not been a grievous loss among us of the sense that we are all under
the judgment of God, that we shall all stand before the judgment seat
of Christ, to give account of all that we have done in the body, good
or bad? And has not the most momentous of all controlling influences
been thus grievously weakened in our own lives? It is enough for one
like myself to suggest the question. It needs a prophet with a Divine
Mission to drive it home.
But the concluding considerations I would urge from such a review of
the condition of the Christian world, and of our own world at this
moment, is that if we would overcome the sins which have undermined
the peace of Europe and brought about the present awful convulsion,
if we would restore and re-establish among ourselves those principles
of Christian Faith which alone can make the nation great and happy,
and keep it so, the one effectual means which includes all others,
the one means which would at once enable us to know what we ought to
do and would provide us with the grace and power to fulfil it, is to
deepen in our own souls, and to revive all around us and among our
people at large, that love of God in Jesus Christ which reveals to us
“whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever
things are of good report,” which gives us a supreme and eternal motive
for following it, and which ensures us the power to overcome the
terrible temptations which beset us. Let us go home from these prayers,
not merely resolved to amend one particular fault, or to combat one
particular evil of our day, but surrendering ourselves more absolutely
than we have yet done to the will and love of God our Saviour, in all
things bringing the revelation of His will, in our Lord Jesus Christ
and in the Scriptures, to bear more than ever on our private, social
and public duties. In short, in the words of the text, let us resolve,
as the supreme law of our life, to walk in the ways which the Lord our
God and our Saviour Jesus Christ have commanded us, that it may be well
with us, and that we may prolong our days in the country and the Empire
in which His providence and His mercy have placed and supported us.
RELIGION AND THE WAR.
FROM “THE RECORD,” SEPTEMBER 23, 1916
The way in which this war is stirring the deepest thoughts of our
people has received a striking illustration during the last three weeks
in a discussion in the pages of the _Westminster Gazette_. In that able
journal religious questions have not ordinarily so congenial a home
as in the _Spectator_, and it is the more illustrative of the tone of
the public mind that, since August 28th last, hardly a day has passed
without the appearance in its columns of letters of great earnestness
on the subject of “Religion and the War.” The discussion was opened
on that day by an anonymous article under that title, which opened
with these words: “‘Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.’ The
words of the Prophet come back to me when I hear the preachers trying
to reconcile the terrors and horrors of this war with the idea of an
all-powerful and all-beneficent Creator”; and around the difficulty
thus started the whole discussion has turned. The writer says he has
listened, during the last few months, to many sermons, and read many of
the articles and pamphlets and books “in which Divines and Philosophers
have endeavoured to plumb these deep waters,” and he states briefly
the principal arguments that he has found in them. It is not necessary
for the present purpose to quote them all, especially as I think the
writer has been unfortunate in his pulpits and his books. Several of
the pleas he quotes are mere platitudes, such as “that the ways of God
are unfathomable, and that one must walk in faith and believe that
things are somehow good.” The point to which he reduces the question is
that under the strain of our present experience “people see suddenly
that the doctrine of an omnipotent and all-loving Creator, as commonly
expounded in pulpits, is at war with the plain facts of the visible
world.” To this problem all the subsequent letters are directed, and
they afford impressive and painful evidence of the distress with which
many men and women seem to be groping in perplexity. There are many
striking and touching observations in them, and sometimes, as by Lord
Halifax, the central principles of the Christian Faith are applied
to the problem. But it is disappointing to find that it is not in
the Bible or in the Christian Faith that most of the writers seek
for a solution of their difficulties. Too many of them seek refuge
in philosophical discussions of matters like the Divine omnipotence
and the abstract problem of evil. The first writer comes to the
conclusion that “theology remains tangled up in its own conception of
omnipotence--which brings us at best to the conclusion that God has
so limited His own power as to permit the existence of evil, and at
worst invests Him with attributes which are the reverse of benevolent,”
and to this philosophical question writer after writer returns. The
consequence is that the light which is thrown upon the whole problem
by the Scriptures and by our Lord Himself is obscured in a maze of
philosophy and words.
What, then, has revelation to say upon the subject? The first thing,
and the most important, which it has to say is almost ignored in the
discussion. As has been said, the problem propounded by the opening
writer is to reconcile the terrors and horrors of this war with the
idea of an “all-powerful and all-beneficent Creator.” From the point of
view of the Bible, of the Psalms in particular, and of our Lord, that
description of the Creator leaves out His most important attribute.
If we add as the Psalms invariably imply, “an all-righteous Creator,”
an element is introduced into the problem which raises entirely fresh
considerations. If you merely ask the question how the pain and
misery of the war are compatible with perfect beneficence and perfect
omnipotence, the answer is obscure. But if you introduce the question
of the compatibility of the permission of such suffering with perfect
righteousness combined with benevolence, the problem is radically
altered. God is dealing with a creature who is not merely capable of
pain and happiness, but of a righteousness and a truth like His own;
and to bestow upon this creature happiness without righteousness would
be inconsistent with the main object for which he was created, and
such an idea would, in fact, involve a contradiction in terms. Once
recognize that there is no happiness possible for man except in the
harmony of his nature with the Divine righteousness, and it is evident
that the main object of an all-benevolent Creator must be to produce
this righteousness in man, and to repress and extirpate, by whatever
means may be requisite, the evil which is incompatible with his
happiness.
Now the Scriptures, from the third chapter of Genesis to the last
chapter of Revelation, exhibit God as employing suffering as a remedy
for unrighteousness or sin. It is a punishment, but it is also a cure.
It may be such suffering as is involved in the condemnation of man to
eat his bread by the sweat of his brow, instead of being able to “put
forth his hand” and seize whatever he craved without effort. It may be
the severer remedy of the punishment of death, or the bitter surgery
of war. But what the Scriptures reveal is that all the suffering of
life, slight or severe, is instituted by God, and employed by Him, to
promote and uphold that righteousness in man which can alone qualify
him for that harmony with God, which is the happiness for which he was
intended. The free will, whatever its degree, with which man has been
endowed, must be educated by the suffering which follows its misuse,
as well as by the satisfaction which is conferred by its right use.
Accordingly it appears to be the cardinal fact of man’s constitution
that unrighteousness throws his nature into disorder, and brings a
similar disorder into his whole social condition. Families, societies,
and nations can only realize their true purposes, they can only
exhibit a true order, when the individuals of whom they are composed
are righteous, and are thus qualified for their true functions. Let
the individuals or component parts become disordered, and the whole
society must be disordered, and involved in confusion and perhaps ruin.
I have sometimes imagined the case of a visitor introduced to some
vast machine, working under immense pressure, and being told by his
guide that unfortunately every part of the machine was more or less
imperfect, and some of the parts almost rotten. Would the visitor care
to expose himself long to the risks of the inevitable explosion? But
that is exactly the case of every human society, small or great. All
the individuals of which it is composed are grievously imperfect, and
some of them are positively vicious. Is it any wonder that it develops
antagonistic forces within itself, and that sooner or later it bursts
into a great conflagration--the conflagration of a revolution or a
war? God, in fact, by this constitution of mankind, has provided that
unrighteousness shall punish itself. He does not intervene, as a rule,
to inflict a special punishment. He leaves men to work out their own
punishment, and to realize from it that there was some corruption at
work in their lives.
If it be asked whether an all-powerful and all-beneficent Being could
not have provided some less distressing method of education, the
first reply may be that of Bishop Butler--that it is foolish for such
creatures as we are to try to devise schemes for the construction of
better worlds than the one we live in. But the Gospel has provided an
answer which removes all temptation to such folly. It reveals the
momentous fact that “God, of His tender mercy, did give His Only Son,
Jesus Christ, to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption.”
There is no need to enter upon theories of the Atonement in order to
appreciate the bearing of that solemn truth upon this problem. Christ,
Who lived and died for our redemption, found it necessary for that
purpose to submit to the sufferings of the Cross--sufferings at least
as bitter as any that are inflicted in war--and He said He submitted to
them because it was the will of His Father--of the God Whom He called
“His Father and our Father, His God and our God”--that He should do
so. It is one satisfactory feature in this discussion that the moral
authority of Christ is generally recognized; but it is very little
noticed, if at all, that that authority declares, both by repeated
assurances, and by the most touching personal experience, that the
infliction and endurance of death and agony are compatible with the
most perfect relations of love and tenderness between God and the
Sufferer.
Our Lord has thus given His blessed personal sanction to what, after
all, has been the instinctive belief of human nature, even before He
lived and died. Cicero, for instance, in his _De Officiis_, states it
more than once as a cardinal principle of human life and duty that
it is more contrary to nature to do or allow unjust acts than to
endure any suffering, loss, or even death. But the Cross of Christ
elevates this inspiring and consoling conviction to the height of a
Divine revelation and consolation; and to those who realize it, the
main practical problem of the sufferings of war is solved. All such
suffering is God’s remedy for moral evil, and is allowed because it is
the only means by which man’s nature can be purified and renovated.
From this point of view it becomes quite unnecessary to perplex
ourselves with philosophical questions respecting omnipotence. When God
has once established a constitution, either for nature or for human
nature, He has limited His Own action by the laws of that constitution
so long as it lasts. He can, indeed, interfere with it for good cause;
and He has done so, both in nature and human nature, by miracle. But
to interpose by miracle to avert all distressing consequences of those
laws would be to abolish the constitution altogether, and this He will
not do until the present dispensation is brought to an end. For the
present, God is governing and educating men by means of the laws which
He has established, both physical and moral, and He leaves men to take
the consequences of their moral violations of those laws, no less than
of their physical.
The example of Christ, in His submission, should be enough to prevent
any man “replying against God” for this constitution of things. The
reflection which should be aroused in our minds by such “terrors and
horrors” as those of this war is, on these principles, that there
must have been something terribly false and vicious in the condition
of the nations of Europe to produce so awful a manifestation of the
consequences of evil. They are the consequences which, under the laws
of human nature established by God, inevitably follow the prevalence
of unrighteousness; and for that reason they are justly described in
Scripture as the manifestation of “the wrath of God” against evil.
On the principles of the Christian Faith, in short, there is one
certainty amidst all our perplexities in this matter. The war and all
its miseries reveal to us the fact that great injustices and moral
evils were prevalent in Europe, and the greatness of the misery may
be taken as a measure of the greatness of the evil. We think we see
these moral and religious evils in the state of our enemies, and
particularly in the state of German life and religion. But we shall
make a fatal mistake if we allow ourselves to think that all the evil
and unrighteousness has been on their side. If we are candid with
ourselves, we shall recognize that a disregard of God and Christ,
a grievous disbelief in the revelation and the guidance they have
given us, and a consequent decay of religion, and looseness of moral
obligations of all kinds, have been making way among us, and have
affected not only our private life, but our standards of public action.
We are discovering more clearly, day by day, that if we are to meet
the terrible dangers by which we are threatened, we must revive, both
in public and in private, the standards of Christian principle which
we formally acknowledge--self-denial, self-control, truth in word and
deed, the fear of God, and the love of Christ; and in proportion as we
succeed in these efforts shall we find that the problems of “religion
and the war” are much simpler, better understood by our fathers, and
more easily grasped by ourselves, than is supposed in the discussion
from which we started.
PRAYER FOR THE DEAD.
FROM “THE RECORD,” NOVEMBER 20, 1914
The question of Prayers for the Dead, and particularly of the adoption
of such prayers in the public services of the Church, has for some time
been pressed forward among us, and under the strain of the distressing
bereavements of the present war it is likely to become urgent. An
attempt has more than once been made at St. Paul’s to celebrate what
would have been a formal _Requiem_ for those who have fallen; and
though it has not yet been fully successful, it may very likely be
renewed. In the forms issued by authority, both at the time of the Boer
War and during the present war, supplications on behalf of the dead
have been introduced, which provoked a gentle remonstrance from even
so moderate and tolerant an Evangelical as the Bishop of Durham. Other
forms will no doubt be prepared by authority for use at the national
intercession on the first Sunday of next year; and in many quarters
much anxiety is felt lest the introduction of such supplications
should be further extended.
This anxiety will not be lessened by the deliberate observations on the
subject which were made by the Primate, in a sermon he preached at All
Hallows, Barking, on All Souls’ Day, which is fully reported in the
_Guardian_ of November 5. He said that “we are not forgetful of the
long and mischievous abuse of the devotion” of praying for the dead “in
the later mediæval days, until,” as Dr. Mason said “it might almost
be said that the main object of religion in the fifteenth century had
been to deliver souls out of the ever-heightening horrors of Purgatory,
and to ensure the living against incurring them.” “We understand,”
said the Archbishop, “why repression of these mischiefs, prevention of
these perils, took in our formularies and our Prayer Books so stern,
so drastic, a character that no explicit Prayers for the departed at
all were admitted into the public language of the Church, and people
were taught to rely, in those public offices, upon that alone which
can be definitely proved by Holy Scripture. I have no word of censure
for those men--Laud and Andrewes, remember, were among them--who thus
handled the difficulties which they had to face. But,” the Archbishop
significantly proceeded, “surely now there is place for a gentler
recognition of the instinctive, the natural, the loyal craving of the
bereaved; and the abuses of the chantry system and the extravagances of
Tetzel need not now, nearly four centuries afterwards, thwart or hinder
the reverent, the absolutely trustful, prayer of a wounded spirit, who
feels it natural and helpful to pray for him whom we shall not greet
on earth again, but who, in his Father’s loving keeping, still lives,
and, as we may surely believe, still grows from strength to strength
in truer purity and in deeper reverence and love. I must not dwell on
that to-day, but in our thought of what our College of Clergy can do,
and has already done, ‘for the perfecting of the Saints, for the work
of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ,’ I do not like
to pass unmentioned a task of wise teaching and of careful guidance,
which at a time of such special opportunity and need may appropriately
be ours.”
These, I think it must be felt, are very significant words. They
indicate clearly that, in the mind of the Archbishop’s advisers, the
present time of bereavement and distress affords an opportunity for
authorizing the use of Prayers for the Departed, which go beyond “that
alone which can be definitely proved by Holy Scripture.” Now, I hope
that, without any lack of respect, I may say at once that, while there
are, as I believe, many members of the Evangelical School to whom some
modification in the language of our Prayer Book in reference to the
departed would not be unwelcome, we should be unanimous in deprecating
in the strongest manner the introduction of anything beyond “that which
can be definitely proved by Holy Scripture”--meaning, as no doubt the
Archbishop does, that which can be proved to be conformable to Holy
Scripture. Supplications which are not strictly conformable to Holy
Scripture may be “natural”--too natural--“instinctive,” and prompted by
a “loyal craving.” But the very place and function of Holy Scripture
is to direct and control our natural and instinctive cravings; and to
allow such natural and instinctive cravings to carry us beyond the
limits which a strict adherence to Holy Scripture would prescribe, is
to abandon an essential principle of the Church of England, and to
forsake the sure guidance which the revelation of the Gospel affords us.
This, in fact, is the very source of the superstitions by which the
worship of God has been corrupted in the Church of Rome. There is no
better illustration of this danger than is afforded by those abuses
in connection with the belief in Purgatory, which the Archbishop so
severely denounces. The Roman system of Prayers for the Dead did not
originally rise from the doctrine of Purgatory, though in their extreme
form they were based on that doctrine. But, historically, the doctrine
of Purgatory was developed out of an undue and unscriptural indulgence
of Prayers for the Dead; and in so far as natural instincts are allowed
at the present day to dictate any such unscriptural indulgence, a
tendency will again be encouraged towards a belief in some form of
Purgatory. The Archbishop asks whether we need be afraid of the abuses
of four centuries ago. But it is not a question of the circumstances
of four centuries ago; it is a question of the dangers of human
nature in every century, and not least in a century like the present,
when there prevails in the Church an avowed drift towards the errors
against which, as the Archbishop says, even Laud and Andrewes thought
it necessary to be on their guard. The condition of the departed is
a matter on which nature can tell us nothing. Our whole knowledge
respecting it, all our hopes respecting it, are derived from the
revelations of our Lord and His Apostles in the New Testament; and if
we wish our prayers in relation to the dead to be in accordance with
truth, and to be acceptable to God, we have more reason on this subject
than on any other “to rely in our public offices upon that alone which
can be proved by Holy Scripture.”
This is so cardinal a principle of our Church that I cannot but feel
confident that it is by an inadvertence, if language is used by
any persons in authority which seems to imply a disregard of it. I
apprehend that what it really means is that our Reformers excluded from
our Prayer Book forms of Prayer for the Dead which were in use in the
primitive Church; and that an appeal is being made to that primitive
example as an authority for their reintroduction. Now, I fully admit
that primitive practice has a _prima-facie_ claim to favourable
consideration; and, as I have urged for years, if that principle were
only acted upon, the Romish practices which are being forced upon our
Church by the ritualistic party would be at once condemned. What,
then, let us ask, were the Prayers for the Dead which were in use in
the primitive Church? The description of them given by Bingham in his
account of the ceremonies at the interment of Christians in the ancient
Church (vol. viii., Oxford edition, p. 151) is in perfect harmony with
that of Field and Ussher, and will not, I think, be questioned. At the
interment, as at the Communion Service, “a solemn commemoration was
made of the dead in general, and prayers offered to God for them--some
Eucharistical, by way of thanksgiving for their deliverance out of
this world’s afflictions, and others by way of intercession that God
would receive their souls to the place of rest and happiness, that
He would pardon their human failures, and not impute to them the sins
of daily incursion, which in the best men are remainders of natural
frailty and corruption; that He would increase their happiness, and
finally bring them to a perfect consummation with all His Saints by
a glorious resurrection.” The spirit and purpose of these prayers
is illuminated by an observation of Archbishop Ussher (_Answer to a
Jesuit_, chapter vii): “In these and other prayers of the like kind we
may descry evident footsteps of the primary intention of the Church in
such supplications for the dead, which was, that the whole man, not
the soul separated only, might receive public remission of sins and a
solemn acquittal in the judgment of that Great Day, and so obtain a
full escape from all the consequences of sin, _the last enemy being
now destroyed, and death swallowed up in victory_, and a perfect
consummation of bliss and happiness. All which are comprised in that
short prayer of St. Paul for Onesiphorus, though made for him while he
was alive: _The Lord grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord
in that day_.”
In other words, all these prayers are for those mercies and blessings
which are revealed and promised in Holy Scripture, and for them
alone. They are not prayers for any alteration in the condition of
the Christian soul during the mysterious period between death and
the Resurrection, respecting which very various opinions have been
held by the Fathers of the Church. They are simply prayers for the
fulfilment, especially at the Day of the Resurrection, of those
promises of justification or acquittal, and of final glory in body
and soul, which are definitely given us in the New Testament. The
objection has been raised that of the fulfilment of these promises we
have certain assurance, and that therefore we need not pray for them.
But, as Ussher and Field abundantly show, this objection is based
upon a serious misconception of the nature of prayer. The ancient
Church, in accordance with the whole spirit of the Scriptures, realized
the privilege of receiving everything from God in the nature of a
gift, and therefore prayed to Him for the very things He had most
surely promised. It is in that gracious childlike spirit that these
supplications for the Christian dead were made in primitive Christian
times; and though that spirit has become, unhappily, somewhat obscured
among us, yet no one can use the petition “Thy Kingdom come” without
being sensible that he is praying for a blessing which is most certain.
For these prayers of the early Church, therefore, there was a full
warrant in Holy Scripture, and there is no occasion to appeal to any
other authority for them.
Why, then, it will be asked, should they not be used in the Church of
England? The first and chief answer is that, in substance, they are
used. In the Burial Service we pray “that it may please Thee shortly
to accomplish the number of Thine elect and to hasten Thy kingdom that
we, with all those that are departed in the true faith of Thy Holy
Name, may have our perfect consummation and bliss in Thy eternal and
everlasting glory.” That is a prayer in the very spirit described by
Bingham and Ussher as that of the primitive Church. Nor can I interpret
in any less comprehensive sense the prayer in our Communion Service,
“that we and all Thy whole Church may obtain remission of our sins,
and all other benefits of His passion.” Field’s statement (vol.
ii., Cambridge edition, p. 97) is fully justified by these prayers.
“Touching Prayer for the Dead, it is well known that Protestants
do not simply condemn all prayer in this kind; for they pray for
the Resurrection, public acquittal in the Day of Judgment, and the
perfect consummation and bliss of them that rest in the Lord, and the
perfecting of whatsoever is yet wanting in them.”
If, therefore, in the Revision of the Prayer Book now pending, or
in official forms of intercession now under consideration, it is
contemplated to add anything to the language of the Prayer Book,
what we have to ask is that such additions may be kept within these
scriptural and primitive limits, and may not introduce petitions
which imply suppositions respecting the condition of the soul in
the intermediate state, of which Scripture tells us nothing. Even
the Archbishop’s language might give some encouragement to such
suppositions, when he speaks of praying “for him ... who still lives
and, as we may surely believe, still grows from strength to strength,
in truer purity and in deepened reverence and love.” Whoever believes
that does so without warrant of Scripture, and prayer based on such a
belief has no authority in revelation. The hope of the Christian is
not that his soul will be gradually purified after death, but that, in
the words of the commendatory prayer in the Service of the Visitation
of the Sick, it may, in death itself, be washed in the blood of that
immaculate Lamb, and presented, when it leaves the body, “pure and
without spot” unto God. Prayers, in short, which have any tinge of a
purgatorial view are unauthorized by Scripture, and inconsistent with
a most blessed element of Evangelical hope and faith. Short of this, I
could wish, for my own part, that we might imitate the purer forms of
prayer in the early Church by more specific mention of the departed,
as in what seems to me the beautiful expressions of the earlier Burial
Service. “We commend into Thy hands of mercy, most merciful Father,
the soul of this our brother departed, and his body we commit to the
earth, beseeching Thine infinite goodness to give us grace to live in
Thy fear and love, and to die in Thy favour; that when the judgment
shall come, which Thou hast committed to Thy wellbeloved Son, both this
our brother and we may be found acceptable in Thy sight.” After all,
in presence of the mysteries of death, and of the condition of those
we have lost, what prayer can be more comforting than one which simply
commends to our Father’s gracious hands, through our Saviour’s merits
and grace, the beloved soul after which we yearn? That is a Prayer for
the Dead which may be offered without scruple and without cessation,
and in which we may find, day by day, and in every moment of sorrow and
distress, our refuge and our consolation.
CHRIST AND THE SOLDIER.
ADDRESS AT THE CHURCH PARADE, IN THE NAVE OF THE CATHEDRAL, SEPT. 27,
1914.
“_Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in
Me._”--St. John xiv. 1.
My brethren, when your Commanding Officer did me the honour to ask
me to address you, I thought I would try to bring before you, in the
simplest and briefest form, the special message which is brought by the
Gospel of Christ to men in such a position as that in which you now
stand--a position of great anxiety and solemn responsibility. You will
meet that responsibility, of course, in the manly and cheerful spirit
which has marked soldiers of great races at all times, from the Jews,
Greeks, and Romans to our own days. But the Gospel of Christ has the
characteristic privilege of bringing good news to human nature in all
circumstances. It sheds a new and blessed light on life and all its
duties, on death and all its fears, and I would fain impress on you, in
one sentence of our Saviour, what is the supreme blessing and guidance
which it affords, especially to soldiers.
That blessing is contained in the few words of my text: _Ye believe in
God; believe also in Me_. They are the first words of our Saviour’s
address to His disciples, at the moment when they were in great trouble
and anxiety, on account of His having told them that He was about to be
violently taken from them. It was no ordinary trouble that they were
about to encounter, but one of the greatest and bitterest that ever
befell human beings. Yet He begins, at once, by bidding them not be
troubled. _Let not your hearts be troubled_, He said. But how were they
to avoid it? He gives them a short and sufficient reason: _Ye believe
in God; believe also in Me_. Remember who they were. They were Jews,
full of the faith of the old Covenant; familiar with the psalms which
we sing every day, believing in God as Abraham did, as David did, as
Isaiah did, and as He Himself had taught them to believe. That was
and is, a grand faith to live in. But our Lord brought an addition to
it, which made it, and makes it, infinitely better. _Ye believe in
God_, He said; _believe also in Me_. He uses the same word of belief
in Himself which He had used of belief in God. “You put your trust in
God,” He seems to say; “You give yourselves up to Him, to obey His
will for life and for death. Do the same for Me. Give yourselves up
also to Me, to obey Me, to trust Me and to love Me.” The privilege of
doing that is the reason He gives them for not letting their heart be
troubled. If they would obey and trust Him with the same faith which
they gave to God, they would have still surer ground for comfort and
strength than if they only believed in the God of their fathers.
This was a great claim for our Lord Jesus Christ to make. But He went
on to shed His blood on the Cross in attestation of it; and, according
to His promise, He rose again after being put to death, to assure us
that He was the living Son of God He claimed to be; and that is our
sufficient reason for believing it. For that reason we take His word
for it, and trust everything He said. But why does this assurance bring
that special comfort to His disciples, and to ourselves, which He
promises? There are many reasons; but on this occasion I will mention
only the one which He Himself proceeds to state. He goes on to declare
at once what is perhaps the greatest of all the comforts which He
brings. He tells us what is our eternal Home, whither He was Himself
going, and where we are meant to go. He says at once: _In My Father’s
house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go
to prepare a place for you; and if I go and prepare a place for you,
I will come again and receive you unto Myself, that where I am there
ye may be also._ Every one of us must ask himself, sooner or later,
where he is going; what is his eternal Home? More especially must we
ask ourselves this question when we are brought face to face, in any
way, with the great issues of life and death. When nations are marching
in their millions to conflicts which must mean an early death to many
of them, we must crave for an answer, more than ever, to the question,
What is beyond death? What is the life into which we shall pass from
this world?
Now, in these few words, our Saviour gives us an assurance on this
question which is more than sufficient. We shall go into a world in
which He is ready to meet us, and in which He is preparing mansions
for us. Without the Gospel, there is a complete veil over the future
life. But to the Christian that veil is lifted by the Saviour and His
Apostles in some glorious details, and above all--far above all--in
this: that the Lord Jesus Christ, that living Man of whom you read
in the Gospels, Whose character stands out so clearly there, in all
graciousness, justice, love, and power, is preparing homes for us, and
will be there to receive us unto Himself. David was inspired to sing,
_When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear
no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me_. It
was a great height of inspired faith to be able to utter that prayer
of trust in the great God of his fathers, surrounded, as he then was,
by clouds and darkness. But what a vastly greater blessing it is to
be able to say it of the Lord Jesus Christ, Whom we are privileged
to know, not only as God, but as Man in flesh and blood, and to be
assured that in death, as in life, we have with us all the sympathy,
all the tenderness, as well as all the righteousness and justice, which
He showed during His life on earth. Had He not reason to say: _Let not
your hearts be troubled; believe in Me_?
But if it is to be a comfort to us to know that we shall be received by
the Lord Jesus Christ when we pass from this world, and that, whether
we pass suddenly or slowly, we shall find ourselves in His hands, we
cannot fail to realize that one condition on our own part is essential.
We must come to Him with a character, and in a condition, which He
can approve. He will meet us in two capacities; first, as our Saviour
and friend, but also as our Judge. Without waiting for that ultimate
judgment which He has announced, the thought of our closer approach to
Him at death must make us deeply apprehensive of His personal judgment
on our character and our lives. If we desire to meet Him in happiness,
we must be preparing ourselves, while we are here, so as to be at least
in general harmony with His will and His character. In consequence of
those inveterate sins of mankind, which bring about wars and all other
such miseries, He Himself, with His own deliberate consent, was brought
to death, and sacrificed His life as an atonement for our evil; and
by that sacrifice He has won from God the Father, His Father and our
Father, the right to forgive us and to judge us mercifully. We may be
sure accordingly that He will receive us into the arms of His mercy,
and pardon our innumerable failures and offences, if we truly repent of
them. But if we are to be at peace with Him hereafter, in His mansions,
He must needs expect us, while we are here, to be trying to grow like
Him, and to be doing His will. This accordingly is the second main
point which follows from this assurance of our Lord. It places us under
the strongest possible obligation to live here as Christ would have us,
in order that we may look forward with full hope to living with Him
hereafter.
Consequently, this promise of Christ obliges us to Christen, as it
were, or to Christianize, the work of our lives, and every duty or
profession in which we are engaged. This is a principle which has
innumerable applications; and I will only apply it this morning to one
aspect of the profession of a soldier. Men had great ideals before
Christ came. Few things are nobler, in the profession of arms, than
the examples of self-sacrifice, of bravery, of generosity, exhibited
by the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans, and, in our own days, by the
Japanese. But the history of the Christian world has shown that it
is possible to raise those ideals, if not to a higher, yet to a more
gracious, height by adding a Christian touch or colour to them. The
knighthood of the Middle Ages, for instance, exhibited the highest
qualities of a manly soldiery, elevated, purified, and illuminated
by the supreme graces of gentleness, of mercy, of tenderness for the
weak, of that impulse to save the suffering and the crushed, which is
embodied in our Lord’s character as “the Saviour.” The knight of the
Middle Ages was essentially the saviour of the weak, the champion of
women, bound by oath to uphold all right and righteousness, to avenge
wrong, to maintain, in the midst of his stern duties, the mercies and
graces of Christian feeling. One of them, as he stood at the bier of
the most famous knight of his day, is described in the old romance as
exclaiming: _And now, I daresay, that Sir Lancelot, there thou liest:
thou wert never matched of none earthly knight’s hands; and thou wert
the courtliest knight that ever bare shield; and thou wert the truest
friend to thy lover that ever bestrode horse; and thou wert the truest
lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou wert the kindest
man that ever stroke with sword; and thou wert the goodliest person
that ever came among press of knights; and thou wert the meekest man
and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou wert the
sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest_.
Can we fail to be sensible that, even in such an imperfect example,
something of the grace of Christian tenderness has been shed over the
character--an essence of Christian feeling, which would make impossible
in such a soldier any brutal violence or wilful injustice? It was, in
fact, the conscious example of Christ which controlled them. They all,
more or less, resembled the knight of our own noble poet Spenser:
For on his breast a bloody cross he bore,
The dear remembrance of his dying Lord:
For Whose sweet sake that glorious badge he wore,
And dead, as living ever, Him adored;
Upon his shield the like was also scored,
For sovran hope which in his help he had.
That is the true badge not only of Christian service to the wounded,
but of Christian warfare itself.
Such, my brethren, is the spirit in which you can apply to your present
duties the exhortation of our Saviour in this gracious and cardinal
text. It bids you to add the belief in the presence of Christ, the
obligation of obedience to Christ, trust in Christ and love towards
Him, to all the other principles by which you are animated. The fact
that you are here, that you are making great sacrifices, that you are
ready to make the greatest sacrifice of all, for your country, is proof
enough that you are animated by high and generous motives, that you
wish to live and die for the greatest of all causes, for righteousness
and justice, for your King and your country. But if you would do the
best you can, do one thing more. Take care to add the spirit of Christ
to these motives and impulses; strive to enter more deeply, day by
day, into His heart and will, to realize more and more, even in the
midst of war, that “new commandment” which He gave us, _that we should
love one another_; and so prepare yourselves to meet Him whenever you
have to do so, as we all have, soon or late, in such a character that
He may be able to say to you: _Well done, good and faithful servant,
enter thou into the joy of thy Lord_. In a word: You believe in God,
and in all that the Name of God stands for--righteousness, truth,
goodness of all kinds: believe also in Christ, and let His love, His
mercy, His purity, His absolute self-sacrifice, add His own peculiar
grace to all your words and deeds, and then you may cherish the
confident hope that _where He is there you will be also_.
THE ETERNAL LIFE OF THE SOUL.
PREACHED IN THE NAVE OF CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, AT THE MILITARY CHURCH
PARADE, OCTOBER 15, 1916.
“_O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee._”--Psalm lxiii. 1.
These words ought to be in the heart and the mouth of every soul in
this congregation. They are the first words of a Psalm, which has been
used as a morning Psalm by many generations of Christians, and it is
the privilege of all of us to echo them. But let us consider carefully
what they mean. Who is the God to Whom they speak? We are in the House
of God, to worship God; and we open our worship, every Sunday, with
a Psalm which tells us who He is. “The Lord,” it says, “is a great
God, a great King above all Gods. In His hand are all the corners of
the earth, and the strength of the hills is His also. The sea is His,
and He made it: and His hands prepared the dry land. O come, let us
worship and fall down, and kneel before the Lord our Maker.” That is
the God to whom the Christian speaks. He is the God Who made heaven and
earth, and whose will and power upholds them from hour to hour. He is
our maker, “and we are the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His
hand.” In other words, “All things were made by Him, and without Him
was not anything made that was made.”
The word “God” is too often used lightly in common conversation among
us, but without due remembrance that it is the Name of the Most awful
and supreme reality that can be thought of. We do not use lightly the
name of our King, but God is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Our
lives and our souls are in the hollow of His hand every moment; and if
we considered only His supreme Majesty and our weak and passing frames,
we are perfectly insignificant beings before Him. But it is to this
Being that the Psalmist addresses the words “O God, Thou art my God;
early will I seek Thee.” We may all say that, as well as the Psalmist.
It is our privilege to speak to the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords,
as our own; we may call Him our God, our own God, we may tell Him that
we seek Him, that we seek Him above all things, and we may say, as the
Psalmist goes on to say, “My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh also
longeth after Thee: in a barren and dry land where no water is. Thus
have I looked for Thee in the sanctuary (in a Cathedral like this) that
I might behold Thy power and glory.” How is it that humble and feeble
creatures like ourselves can thus call the God of heaven and earth our
own, and speak to Him, and tell Him, in this earnest language, that we
cannot do without Him? Where, above all, can we find Him and approach
Him?
The Psalmist used these words, and we may use them too, because this
God is the nearest of all things in the world to us, and because we are
in daily contact with Him in our hearts and souls. It is true He is so
great and infinite, that He has made the world, and all its marvels
and glories; but we are more concerned to realize that He has made
our own selves, and our minds and hearts and consciences, and when we
look into those hearts, and listen to those consciences, we are only
experiencing, in ourselves, the work of His hands, and listening to His
voice. Above all other things, God made right and wrong, He made us to
realize the difference between right and wrong; He made the truth, and
enabled us to love it, and to hate what is false; in a word, He made
our consciences and our minds; and He lives and works in them, as much
as He does in the world at large. It is very well for us to look up
to the heavens, to think of Him as the Creator of all those stars and
worlds, or to look into the infinite mysteries of this world’s life,
its minute elements and atoms; but it is more important for us to think
of Him as the Giver, and Ruler, and Guide of our very souls and bodies,
Who determined what we were made for, and what we ought to do, what
sort of a life we ought to live, putting into our hearts the knowledge
of our duty, warning us of it by the constant voice of our consciences,
and bidding us realize that He will judge us, for our obedience or
disobedience to His will and His commands. Think of God, by all means,
in His greatness and His Majesty, and His awful powers, but then think
of Him as actually in contact with you in your own souls, teaching you
and speaking to you in your consciences, and calling to you, by your
sense of right and wrong, to remember that He is your judge, and that
your very life and happiness depend upon your union with Him. That is
the thought of God that should be incessantly in our minds. As the
Scripture says more than once, you need not go to the heavens to seek
Him there, you need not go into the depths of the earth to seek Him
there, but He is near you, nearer to you than anything else, in your
very souls and consciences; you hear His voice there, you feel the
influence of His Spirit; there you can always find Him, you can turn to
Him at any moment and say “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek
Thee.”
There is no reality in the world which can be compared, in its
momentous importance, to this. It must be brought home to us, by the
experience which is thrust upon us by the Great War, that everything
else with which we have to do, everything else in the world, passes
away from us. So it does indeed from everybody, at all times, whether
times of war or of peace. There comes a time to every soul when it
has to leave the body, and, with the body, everything else with which
it has been associated in this world. We all know it when we think
seriously about it; but the misfortune is that, in ordinary life, men
do not think seriously about it. All their thoughts and interests
are engaged in the business and the pleasures and the interests of
this life, and they seldom look beyond. But in days like the present
we are forced to look beyond them. You, above all, who, at the call
of duty, have laid behind you, for the present, all the ordinary
interests of life, and are offering yourselves to all the risks of the
battlefield--you have reason to ask, with supreme earnestness, what
is the reality for which you are making this sacrifice, and what will
remain to you if the full sacrifice should be exacted from you.
It is the grand answer of our religion, to say that, whatever happens,
God remains to you. This God, moreover, is not a distant God, not
merely the Maker of the heavens and the earth, but your God, the God
of your inmost soul, the God of your conscience, the God whose eye
sees into your hearts, and Whose hand has been with you from your
childhood, to help you, to guide you, and to inspire you with all the
thoughts of truth, of manliness, of faithfulness, of purity, which you
have felt working in you. Whenever the outward clothing of our souls
drops off from us, whether in the death of old age, or the death of
sickness, or the death of the battlefield, our souls will certainly
be in the immediate presence of One Supreme Reality; and that is the
God with Whom, in our conscience, our souls have been in contact day
by day, and night by night, throughout our lives. That is why we come
to worship Him here, that is why we pray to Him day by day, and I hope
hour by hour, and minute by minute. That is why we should say to Him
like the Psalmist “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek Thee.”
Nothing else is of permanent and everlasting consequence to us, but our
relation to Him, and our union with Him--His relation to us, and His
love of us. While everything is shaking around us, while the kingdoms
are moved, and lives seem thrown away as things of small value, let
us remember that one great Living Being remains to all of us, to those
whose lives are lost on earth, and to those who remain, and that is
the Eternal God, the Giver of all truth, and righteousness and love;
and the greater the strain and stress of life and death, the more may
we confidently exclaim, in the tumult of the battlefield as much as in
the peace of this sanctuary, “O God, Thou art my God; early will I seek
Thee.”
But when and where are you to seek Him? The question has been answered
in the truths of which I have reminded you. Seek Him in obedience to
that Voice of His, which you hear in your consciences, seek Him in
obedience to those principles of right, as against wrong, which He has
implanted in you, and which His Spirit is continually reviving in you;
seek Him in trying, day by day, to do His Will as He has revealed it to
you in His word, especially as He has revealed it to you in the life
and teaching of His Own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. Seek Him in those
sacraments and ordinances of His Church which he has instituted for
our comfort. If you obey our Lord Jesus Christ, and try to follow His
life, His Spirit will speak to you continually in your consciences,
will help you to know your duty and to do it, and you will be saying
in practice what you say in words: “O God, Thou art my God; early will
I seek Thee.” Our Lord has told you that if you are true hearted in
trying to do this, He will forgive you your failures and weaknesses,
that He has died to make atonement for them, that He will take you
by the hand as you pass from this life to the next, and will be your
advocate and sponsor before the face of the righteous and Almighty God.
Let us bring this spirit into all we do and all we think, and we shall
then be able to join in the succeeding words of this Psalm, “Have I not
remembered Thee in my bed: and thought upon Thee when I was waking?
Because Thou hast been my helper: therefore under the shadow of Thy
wings will I rejoice. My soul hangeth upon Thee: Thy right hand hath
upholden me.” May God grant us all this faith and this eternal life
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Hunt, Barnard & Co., Ltd., Printers, London and Aylesbury.
WORKS BY HENRY WACE, D.D.,
Dean of Canterbury.
SOME QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.
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=The Atonement.=
=The Estimate and Use of the Holy Scripture in the Church of England.=
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* * * * *
Transcriber’s Note
Minor punctuation errors have been corrected (i.e. missing periods).
Original spellings and variations (i.e. civilization and civilisation)
have been retained, except for the following apparent typographical
errors:
Page 35, “temporaly” changed to “temporal.” (for the things which are
seen are temporal)
Page 89, “eleswhere” changed to “elsewhere.” (a picture not adequately
described elsewhere)
Page 94, “idolators” changed to “idolaters.” (whoremongers, and
murderers, and idolaters)
Page 106, “thoughout” changed to “throughout.” (gracious throughout
their vast Empire)
Page 223, “repecting” changed to “respecting.” (respecting which very
various opinions have)
Chapter VIII’s sermon, Resistance Unto Blood, was incorrectly labeled
as having taken place April 3, 1916. It has been corrected to read
April 21, 1916. (The correct date was listed in the Table of Contents.)
The following inconsistencies were present in the original text:
Differences in the titles given in the Table of Contents and chapter
headings for these sermons:
Chapter IX
Chapter XI
Differences in the dates given in the Table of Contents and chapter
headings for these sermons:
Chapter XIII, Reasons for Intercession
Chapter XVI, Religion and War
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The War and the Gospel - Sermons & Addresses During the Present War" ***
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