Title: The Book of Light in the Hand of Love - A plea for the British and Foreign Bible Society
Author: Vaughan, Charles J.
Language: English
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LOVE***


Transcribed from the 1872 Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer edition by
David Price.



                 _THE BOOK OF LIGHT IN THE HAND OF LOVE_:


                                * * * * *

                                  A PLEA
                                   FOR
                  The British and Foreign Bible Society.

                                * * * * *

                                 A SERMON

                    PREACHED IN ST. PAUL’S CATHEDRAL,
                    _ON TUESDAY_, _APRIL 30_, _1872_.

                                * * * * *

                                    BY
                           C. J. VAUGHAN, D.D.
                          MASTER OF THE TEMPLE,
                  AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN.

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

                          PUBLISHED BY REQUEST.

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

                                 LONDON:
                    LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER.
                                  1872.



_THE BOOK OF LIGHT IN THE HAND OF LOVE_:
A SERMON.


                             1 JOHN i. 5. iv. 16.
                     “_God is Light_.”  “_God is Love_.”

ROUND these two centres revolves the Theology of St. John.

He is named “the Divine,” the Theologian; and this is his scheme of
Theology, his system of Divinity; not an enumeration of doctrines, not an
enunciation of Articles, not Calvinism, not Arminianism, not Romanism,
and not Protestantism; but just these two principles, higher and deeper
than any question which divides parties or distinguishes sects: the
first, “God is Light,” and the second, “God is Love.”

We are not saying, God forbid! that two brief maxims, one a metaphor, the
other an abstraction, in such sense comprehend Theology as that there
shall be no need of express declarations of fact, or of definite
revelations of truth, beside or beyond, within or above, them.  Nor are
we saying—this, too, would be ignorance, as much as irreverence—that this
very Epistle of St. John is destitute of method or system or logical
coherence; consists only of a few platitudes and a few tautologies, the
amiable feeblenesses of a pious old age, encouraging the scoffer’s notion
that there is nothing in religion but what comes naturally to every man,
whether to originate, to utter, to judge, or to refuse.  Of St. John’s
writings, more perhaps than of any part of Holy Scripture, is the Divine
saying true, “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and
hast revealed them unto babes.”  That which to the self-sufficient critic
is a simplicity bordering on the puerile, is to the experienced Christian
rather a profound mystery, of which the Holy Spirit of God keeps the key.

(1)  “God is Light.”  “In Him is no darkness at all.”  He is the Light of
truth, and the Light of holiness, and the Light of direction, and the
Light of comfort.  Where He, who is the Light, shines not, or shines only
in some dim reflection—of Nature, or reason, or conscience, or tradition;
not directly, not personally, not in Christ as the Saviour, not in the
Holy Ghost as the Comforter—there is darkness; darkness four-fold, like
the light—the darkness of ignorance, and the darkness of corruption, and
the darkness of error, and the darkness of misery.  “God is Light,”—and
the purpose of Light is to shine: but the light itself may be set under a
bushel, or the thick walls, the opaque windows, of the soul’s dwelling
may shut it out.  Vice, superstition, false religion, cowardice,
indifference, law itself, may bar the entrance of Him who is the Light.
Such power is the mystery of mysteries in the present: how God should be
Light, and yet the darkness may refuse to let the Light in.

“God is Light”—first and before all else.  They who would know God must
know Him thus.  No other attribute, no other manifestation, can be
substituted for this or prefixed to it.  Attempts have been made to
displace it.  To put, for example, the second text first—love before
light; or something else—obedience, docility, humility, patience.  It
will not answer.  The transposition bewrays itself by the failure.  “God
is Light,” and he who would know God must first come to Him as the Light.

Some have said, A half-light is better than none.  Better twilight than
thick darkness.  So far we agree with them.  But when they have gone on
to recommend an acquiescence—temporary at least, prudential,
deferential—in the half-light; when they have spoken of the necessity of
preparation for the full light, of the peril of precipitating
illumination, of the duty of forecasting probable consequences—such as a
disarrangement of existing habits and systems, an exposure of errors, an
unmasking of superstitions, before we have the machinery ready for the
education and for the fostering of the man isolated by the very
enlightenment—then we say, God is Light, and there is no communion
between light and darkness.  Prudence is out of place where the question
is of the Divine self-manifestation.  At all risks God must shine, and
God must be trusted to take care of His shining.

Man, by God’s gift, has a right to the light.  As well might you portion
off one strip or one chink of the sky, and say to your dependant, I
forbid you the rest of it—as well might you shut up within prison walls a
man who had done you no wrong, and tell him that candle or rushlight was
good enough for him to see by—as undertake to settle for one class or one
tribe or one race of mankind the amount of Divine illumination which
shall suffice for them, on the plea that to give more might disturb
existing arrangements of civil or religious polity, or that until you
could provide the culture you must hesitate to give the life.  God dealt
not thus with us, when He lit the flame of reviving light in this nation
of England.  First He brought into it, in this house and that, in this
heart and that, the new-found, the dearly-prized treasure of His Word
read in the tongue wherein we were born; and then He gave the new-made
man a Reformed Communion in which to worship.  “God is Light,” and they
who know God must fearlessly let in upon others the light communicated to
themselves.

(2)  For, indeed, brethren, the second text is the mouthpiece and
interpreter of the former.  “God is Love.”  The Light is no distant,
self-contained, abstract thing—like a science or a philosophy which men
may study if they will, but which comes not forth itself to invite or to
embrace its votary.  The Light of which St. John speaks, the Light which
is God, has another name besides—a name which describes it as offering,
volunteering, entreating sympathy—a name which expresses the yearning of
a heart, and the stretching out of a hand, towards an object of concern,
compassion, and commiseration.  If “God is Light” be ambiguous as a
direction, “God is Love” speaks plainly, and is no proverb.  That voice,
wheresoever it is heard—that voice, which is articulate only in the
Gospel—has set in motion palsied limbs, and quickened dead souls, in the
transmission and propagation of a Divine Light.  “Si documentum quæris,
circumspice!”  This day, this scene, this assembly, is the proof of it.
“I looked, and behold, an hand was sent unto me; and lo, a roll of a book
was therein.”  The hand was the Hand of Love, and the book was the Book
of Light.

The Book was the Book of Light.  When you hold it, as this day, closed in
your hand; not opening it, for interpretation—that is not your office—but
carrying it forth closed for another to open; when you think of it as a
whole, gathering into one the scattered rays of its light, that you may
say in a word why it is that you are devoting time and toil and substance
to its dissemination; this, I think, will be your account of it.

(1)  The Bible is the revelation to me of a living God.  And by a living
God, I mean a God whose life is towards me: not such a life as that which
Elijah sketched in mockery as the life of Baal—a kind of life which made
him deaf to man’s cry; a life separate and selfish and distant—talking,
pursuing, journeying, per-adventure sleeping.  The very opposite of this.
A God whose activity is towards this world.  A God whose eye and whose
ear is ever open to the conduct and condition of His creatures—whose
vigilance never tires, and yet is a vigilance even more of concern than
of observation.  One whom I cannot escape from if I would, but whose
inevitable Presence is the very cause of my strength, my motion, my
being.  The revelation of a personal God is the first gift of this Bible.
So intent is the Bible upon this work, that it risks many taunts, many
misconstructions, in securing it.  It is so earnest to make me see God in
everything, that it cares not if it seems to say, God does everything
that happens; even hardens the enemy’s heart, even sends the error which
infatuates, even commissions the lying spirit, or punishes the prophet
for going where he was bidden.  The Bible risks these things—leaves them
to be corrected by opposite sayings, or by the intuitions of that
conscience to which it addresses itself—that it may at least effect
this—make me see God, hear God, be conscious of God, everywhere and in
all things; assure me that nothing is, with God, either too great for His
control, or too little for His notice, if it affects me—my welfare, my
happiness, my work, or my end.  Anything, anything, says the voice of the
Light, rather than a God too great to act, or a God too sublime to feel!
Say at once, Where God is, He works.  Call upon Him in thy prosperity,
that He may bless thee; call upon Him in the time of trouble, so shall He
hear thee, and thou shalt praise Him!

(2)  The Bible is the revelation to me of a Divine Saviour.  I carry
about me, I carry within me, a burden of guilt and sin.  Ignore this, in
thy dealing with me—and however eloquent, however wise, however lofty thy
counsels, they touch me not, they address not me.  Recognize this when
thou speakest to me of a God around and above me; and however humble,
however simple, however human thy monitions, they find me out, they
penetrate me, they thrill me through and through, because they deal with
me as I am, and they tell me of that which I want.  The Book of Light is
the revelation of a Saviour.  From its first page to its latest, it is
the testimony of Jesus.  When I see this, all is made plain.  Patriarchs,
and lawgivers, and psalmists, and prophets, and kings, all, if they are
in God’s Book, point on to, or point back to, Jesus.  Descriptions of
life, personal and national—records of sins and vices and
crimes—narratives of wrath and mercy, of judgment and restoration—even
details of ordinance and ritual, which were else trivial or
wearisome—become instinct with meaning, brilliant with beauty, when I
read them in the Book of Light, because I know that there they all speak
of Jesus, and add something—something real, definite, tangible—to the
hope of pardon and acceptance which is bound up for me in Him.

(3)  The Bible is the revelation to me of an everlasting Heaven.  We
cannot exaggerate the power of that word.  The experiences of this life
are various for man and man: for most men they are various from period to
period of the unit life.  We say not whether, on the whole—taking the
average of men, and the average also of the life—it is better, if earth
were all, to have been or not to have been.  But one thing is
certain—that this earth is not, cannot be, for the most fortunate, either
rest or satisfaction.  Death alone would forbid that.  Change, decay,
separation—separation of hearts yet more than of lives—discords and
discrepancies making union here impossible—would alone make a man write
“vanity of vanities” upon his tomb.  It is this, it is this above all,
which gives the Bible its power.  It reveals Heaven.  It tells of an
immortality which shall reconcile differences; an immortality which shall
redress wrongs; an immortality which shall re-unite the severed, and knit
all hearts in one, in the haven, and in the Heaven, and in the Heart, of
God.  Marvel not if a Book possessing this secret is a Book omnipotent
over the affections of mankind.  Believe it, and life takes a new colour.
If the hand of love carries this roll, it comes indeed for the healing of
the nations!

                                * * * * *

The Hand of Love bears the Book of Light.

Quite inexplicable, without love, the scene before us this day.
Philanthropy, without the Gospel, was not.  Charity herself is the
creation of Jesus Christ.  How much more that charity which is the love
of souls!

This Society, now keeping her sixty-eighth birthday, has chosen a
distinct province.  I would commend her to you, brethren—nay, you are
here because you love her—on two special grounds.

(1)  She is the witness—as such, God has owned her—to the primary
importance of the spiritual life.  Light first, then love.  Illumination
the condition of union.  First the quickening, then the combination.
First the spirit, then the body.  First the soul, then the Church.

The argument is sometimes turned against us.  You set aside the Church.
You treat the individual as though he were a unit.  You wait not for
priest or presbyter; you intrude yourself between the man and the
community; you care not if you even sow discord—if you even make a man
see the lie in the Church’s right hand.  What if one of your agents offer
your Book—Divine, of course, it is—to a man prohibited by rule and
censure from reading it?  What if, as he reads thus against order your
Divine Book, he should perceive, in some point or in many points, the
hollowness, the nakedness of the system in which he has been brought up?
What if you pass on, and leave him an isolated man, a separatist, a
schismatic, where before he was the member of a body?  And you have done
this of the self-will, of the separate schismatical action, which is a
feature of your organization!

The charge is—let us understand it—that in offering the light
promiscuously, we set the Bible above the Church.  We ought to have
waited till Rome gave leave—till Rome unsaid her saying—till the
unchangeable system changed itself—till Rome gave the Word of God free
course amongst her people!  Till then, we can only give light at the cost
of love.  We divide, we dissever, we isolate, the life from the
communion.  We leave the man taught of God an Ishmael among his brethren.

Brethren! we are not careful to answer concerning this matter.  If it be
so; if the possession of light be anywhere, in any Christian community,
contraband; if a Church prohibits the Bible; if a member of that Church,
possessing a Bible, reads in it that Church’s rebuke; if at last, trying
all means of subordination, he must take his choice between his God and
his Church—we did not suggest it; we did all we could to harmonize and to
reconcile; we even took Rome’s Version, and bade him read out of it the
words of life; we know how earnestly the Bible presses communion—how
strong will be the pressure upon its student, not to live alone, not to
isolate himself—on the very contrary, to feel, to cherish, to insist upon
Church membership—but if—if the Book of Light does condemn, in the man’s
conscience, the Church of his birth and of his Baptism—can we, ought we,
to lie to him?  Can we, ought we, to withhold the light, lest haply the
light should condemn?  The light of God is the right of mankind; the hand
of love must offer it!

This Society is, we frankly say, a witness to the primary importance of
the individual life.  It is God’s order.  Out of the individual—not the
other way—grows the community.  It was so at Jerusalem, it was so at
Damascus, it was so at Antioch, it was so at Philippi, it was so at
Ephesus, it was so at Rome.  It was so—to come nearer home—in England, in
London, at Oxford, at Gloucester, at Paul’s Cross, and in Smithfield
fires.  All God’s mightiest works of grace have sprung out of individual
convictions.  To wait till an irreversible judgment is reversed—to wait
till a bigoted and tyrannical Church invites her members to read and to
hear, to meditate and to judge—is, in other words, to decide that God’s
truth shall wait man’s convenience, that souls shall live out their days
ignorant of the Word that (through grace) quickens!

My brethren, we but return to primitive usage, when we claim this
prerogative, this majesty, for the Book of God.  Dear in all ages has
this writing been to the heart of the Church’s martyrs and the Church’s
saints.  It is a new view, this, of the right of a community to stand
between a man and his Bible!  Surely it is a putting of proprieties and
decorums in the place of truth and experience and the one thing needful.
Is it thus that God acts?  What greatest of God’s works has been wrought
by method and rule?  Cornelius and his assemblage receiving the Holy
Ghost before Baptism is a type, surely, for every age, of the manner in
which God Himself, in the free, unfettered breathing of His Divine
Spirit, passes by at His will the mechanism of order, and reveals Himself
in the liberty of an elemental strength.

(2)  But while we assert thus earnestly the supremacy of conscience, and
the right of the individual man to the possession of the Book of Light,
we would also, and not less earnestly, commend to you this great Society
as the servant and the minister of all the Churches.

Very touching is it, to Christian hearts, to read the simple record of
her ministrations in this chief capacity.  The destitution of the Church
in Wales called her into existence.  The Church in Ireland had been for
more than a century without an edition of a complete native Bible, when
she interposed.  The fortunes of Continental nations have their
reflection in her history.  The wars of the first French Revolution are
chronicled in her account-books.  Her first French Bible was printed for
the prisoners of war in 1805.  Through her efforts, in the same
disastrous time, hundreds of Spanish captives might be seen in prison
yards reading in their own tongue the living, life-giving Word.  The
great Abolition Act of 1834 suggested the gift of the New Testament to a
hundred thousand of the then emancipated slaves.  The Spanish Revolution
of 1868 opened a new country to the Gospel, and has spread already two
hundred thousand copies of the Holy Scriptures among the people of that
still distracted and storm-tossed land.  The consolidation of Italy—last
of all, the erection of a constitutional throne on the Roman Capitol
itself—has been followed by the formation of a new Bible Society, to
which we give the right hand of fellowship, and hope ere long to resign
the field which is her own.  The protracted agonies of a yet nearer
neighbour, under a succession of strokes and plagues unexampled in
history, have been soothed by the holy offices of this Society,
extending, alike to Imperialist, Republican, Communist prisoner, the
comfort, in his hour of distress, of that Book not of this world, which
at once blesses earth and opens Heaven.  Not a country, not a province,
escapes the notice of that vigilant eye, which watches from the shores of
England each door opened by the Providence of God for the entry of the
Gospel of Jesus Christ.  No Society, of this Church or that, for
Christian Missions, can dispense with her aid in furnishing the divine
material.  In two hundred and fifty Versions, of the languages and
dialects spoken on the face of this earth by nations of the great
dispersion, more than one hundred millions of copies of God’s Word have
been issued, or aided in the issuing, by this marvellous agency of
evangelization.

Brethren! an organization thus blessed, thus vivified, by the Omnipotent
Hand, stands no longer on the defensive in the battle-field of
Christianity.  One by one, unfriendly voices are silenced.  One by one,
enemies are becoming friends.  Already the reverend rulers of our own
Church, with comparatively few exceptions, have seen their way to
sympathy and co-operation.  It was ungrateful—I know it was
involuntary—to accept help for all manner of Church action, and to refuse
thanks, or even recognition, to the hands which bountifully supplied it.
We thank God, those days are past.  Without ceasing to be the handmaid of
all Churches, the British and Foreign Bible Society is certainly the
friend, the “deaconess,” of one.  Your presence to-day in this great
Metropolitan Cathedral—where so lately Royalty itself bowed the knee, in
thanksgiving for a precious life restored, to the all-ruling Majesty in
the heavens—proves that your work is regarded and honoured, as it ought
to be, by that great National Church of England, of which you are all, I
well know, either dutiful members or else cordial well-wishers.

Thus our tried and honoured Society sets out on another year of anxious,
responsible, yet (under God) most hopeful service.  We give thanks
to-day, we pray also to-day, for this mighty bulwark—it is so—of the
national prosperity!  Every largest, every humblest offering, of time or
wealth, of effort or sympathy, given to her, is given, be ye well
assured, to England’s honour, to England’s strength, to England’s
prosperity.  The land of the Bible is a land of light, a land of peace,
and a land of liberty.  Nations may war for fame or supremacy, for
treasure or territory, for frontier or empire—war may breed war, and an
iron heel alone coerce the savage writhings of an implacable
foe—England’s peace, England’s honour, is in surer safe-keeping, so long
as she acknowledges the Christ of the Bible, and suffers not a creeping
infidelity to seduce her from the allegiance of the life-giving God.

But Oh, brethren, let us not be highminded, but fear!  Let us not boast
ourselves in our light nor in our freedom!  Let us not count but weigh
our safeguards!  Let us make large allowance for waste, even in our
blessings!  Holy Scripture is multiplied among us, till it is a very
proverb of cheapness—see that there be not, concerning it, at once an
arrogance and a despite!  Is the Bible dear to your hearts, as well as
plentiful in your homes?  Do you not only fight for it, but wrestle with
God over it?  Do you draw from it, not your weapons of attack, but your
helmet and your shield and your breastplate?  In these days you sorely
need them.  Remember how only (St. Paul says) we can wield the Spirit’s
sword—even by praying always in the Spirit.  Take to your heart the words
of a great orator of our time, speaking, as a Catholic Priest, in the
very centre and focus of Romanism, in behalf—strange, strange, strange
phenomenon—in behalf of a new Bible Society for Italy!—“Catholics and
Protestants, but all Christians, behold, we are united in this city,
which has been the cause of our separation!  This Book is our bond of
union. . . .  We are all children of the Bible, but we are fallen,
divided, powerless. . . .  The Bible has been neglected. . . .  The life
of the Church is the life of the soul in Christ, and of Christ in the
soul. . . .  Direct and vital dealings with God’s Word will give reality
to our religious life, and will defend us alike from scepticism and from
superstition. . . .  A day is coming—and my heart tells me it is not far
off—in which the question shall not be whether men are Roman Catholics,
or Greek Catholics, or Lutheran Protestants, or Reformed Protestants, but
only whether they are true Catholics, and, above all, true Christians. .
. .  We shall enter the city of God, Bible in hand, singing in every
language, and in every denominational peculiarity, but with one faith and
with one heart: and that city of our unity shall be called the city of
Peace, for it shall be, as saith the Prophet, the city of Truth.”

Such is God’s order: Truth first, then Peace: Light first, then Love;
Love out of, because of, the Light.

May God, of His infinite mercy, realize that hope, grant that prayer, in
His time—and bring us all, in the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a
perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ!

                                * * * * *

                                * * * * *

               LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.





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