And now, my dear friends, what has this to do with us? If this chapter was a lesson to our forefathers, how is it to be a lesson to us likewise?
I have always told you (as those who have really understood their Bibles in all ages have told men) that the Bible sets forth the eternal laws of God’s kingdom—the laws by which God, that is, our Lord Jesus Christ, governs nations and kingdoms—and not only nations and kingdoms, but you and me, and every individual Christian man; “all these things,” says St Paul, are “written for our admonition.” The history of the Jews is, or may be, your history or mine, for good or for evil; as God dealt with them, so is He dealing with you and me. By their experience we must learn. By their chastisements we must be warned. So says St Paul. So have all preachers said who have understood St Paul—and so say I to you. And the lesson that we may learn from this chapter is, that we may repent and yet be punished.
I know people do not like to believe that; I know that it is much more convenient to fancy that when a man repents, and, as he says, turns over a new leaf, he need trouble himself no more about his past sins. But it is a mistake; not only is the letter and spirit of Scripture against him, but facts are against him. He may not choose to trouble himself about his past sins; but he will find that his past sins trouble him, whether he chooses or not,—and that often in a very terrible way, as they troubled those poor Jews in their day, and our forefathers after the Reformation.
“What?” some will say, “is it not expressly written in Scripture that ‘when the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness that he hath committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive?’ and ‘all his transgressions that he hath committed they shall not be mentioned unto him,’ but that ‘in his righteousness which he hath done he shall live?’”
No doubt it is so written, my friends. And no doubt it is perfectly and literally true: but answer me this, when does the wicked man do that which is lawful and right? The minute after he has repented? or the day after? or even seven years after?—the minute after he is forgiven, and received freely back again as God’s child, as he will be, for the sake of that precious blood which Christ poured out upon the cross? Would to God it were so, my friends. Would to God it were so easy to do right, after having been accustomed to do wrong. Would to God it were so easy to get a clean heart and a right spirit. Would to God it were so easy to break through all the old bad habits—perhaps the habits of a whole life-time. But it is in vain to expect this sudden change of character. As well may we expect a man, who has been laid low with fever, to get up and go about to his work the moment his disease takes a favourable turn.
No. After the forgiveness of sin must come the cure of sin. And that cure, like most cures, is a long and a painful process. The sin may have been some animal sin, like drunkenness; and we all know how difficult it is to cure that. Or it may have been a spiritual sin—pride, vanity, covetousness. Can any man put off these bad habits in a moment, as he puts off his coat? Those who so fancy, can know very little of human nature, and have observed their own hearts and their fellow creatures very carelessly. If you will look at facts, what you will find is this:—that all sins and bad habits fill the soul with evil humours, just as a fever or any other severe disease fills the body; and that, as in the case of a fever, those evil humours remain after the acute disease is past, and are but too apt to break out again, to cause relapses, to torment the poor patient, perhaps to leave his character crippled and disfigured all his life—certainly to require long and often severe treatment by the heavenly physician, Christ, the purifier as well as the redeemer of our sin-sick souls. Heavy, therefore, and bitter and shameful is the burden which many a man has to bear after he has turned from self to God, from sin to holiness. He is haunted, as it were, by the ghosts of his old follies. He finds out the bitter truth of St Paul’s words, that there is another law in his body warring against the law of his mind, of his conscience, and his reason; so that when he would do good, evil is present with him. The good that he would do he does not do; and the evil that he would not do he does. Till he cries with St Paul, “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” and feels that none can deliver him, save Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yes. But there is our comfort, there is our hope—Christ, the great healer, the great physician, can deliver us, and will deliver us from the remains of our old sins, the consequences of our own follies. Not, indeed, at once, or by miracle; but by slow education in new and nobler motives, in purer and more unselfish habits. And better for us, perhaps, that He should not cure us at once, lest we should fancy that sin was a light thing, which we could throw off whenever we chose; and not what it is, an inward disease, corroding and corrupting, the wages whereof are death. Therefore it is, that because Christ loves us He hates our sins, and cannot abide or endure them, will punish them, and is merciful and loving in punishing them, as long as a tincture or remnant of sin is left in us.
Let us then, if our consciences condemn us of living evil lives, turn and repent before it be too late; before our consciences are hardened; before the purer and nobler feelings which we learnt at our mothers’ knees are stifled by the ways of the world; before we are hardened into bad habits, and grown frivolous, sensual, selfish and worldly. Let us repent. Let us put ourselves into the hands of Christ, the great physician, and ask Him to heal our wounded souls, and purge our corrupted souls; and leave to Him the choice of how He will do it. Let us be content to be punished and chastised. If we deserve punishment, let us bear it, and bear it like men; as we should bear the surgeon’s knife, knowing that it is for our good, and that the hand which inflicts pain is the hand of one who so loves us, that He stooped to die for us on the cross. Let Him deal with us, if He see fit, as He dealt with David of old, when He forgave his sin, and yet punished it by the death of his child. Let Him do what He will by us, provided He does—what He will do—make us good men.
That is what we need to be—just, merciful, pure, faithful, loyal, useful, honourable with true honour, in the sight of God and man. That is what we need to be. That is what we shall be at last, if we put ourselves into Christ’s hand, and ask Him for the clean heart and the right spirit, which is His own spirit, the spirit of all goodness. And provided we attain, at last, to that—provided we attain, at last, to the truly heroic and divine life, which is the life of virtue, it will matter little to us by what wild and weary ways, or through what painful and humiliating processes, we have arrived thither. If God has loved us, if God will receive us, then let us submit loyally and humbly to His law.
“Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.”
Preached for the Kirkdale Ragged Schools,Liverpool, 1870.
St Matt, xviii. 14. “It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish.”
I am here to plead for the Kirkdale Industrial Ragged School, and Free School-room Church. The great majority of children who attend this school belong to the class of “street arabs,” as they are now called; and either already belong to, or are likely to sink into, the dangerous classes—professional law-breakers, profligates, and barbarians. How these children have been fed, civilized, christianized, taught trades and domestic employments, and saved from ruin of body and soul, I leave to you to read in the report. Let us take hold of these little ones at once. They are now soft, plastic, mouldable; a tone will stir their young souls to the very depths, a look will affect them for ever. But a hardening process has commenced within them, and if they are not seized at once, they will become harder than adamant; and then scalding tears, and the most earnest trials, will be all but useless.
This report contains full and pleasant proof of the success of the schools; but it contains also full proof of a fact which is anything but pleasant—of the existence in Liverpool of a need for such an institution. How is it that when a ragged school like this is opened, it is filled at once: that it is enlarged year after year, and yet is filled and filled again? Whence comes this large population of children who are needy, if not destitute; and who are, or are in a fair way to become, dangerous? And whence comes the population of parents whom these children represent? How is it that in Liverpool, if I am rightly informed, more than four hundred and fifty children were committed by the magistrates last year for various offences; almost every one of whom, of course, represents several more, brothers, sisters, companions, corrupted by him, or corrupting him. You have your reformatories, your training ships, like your Akbar, which I visited with deep satisfaction yesterday—institutions which are an honour to the town of Liverpool, at least to many of its citizens. But how is it that they are ever needed? How is it—and this, if correct, or only half correct, is a fact altogether horrible—that there are now between ten and twelve thousand children in Liverpool who attend no school—twelve thousand children in ignorance of their duty to God and man, in training for that dangerous class, which you have, it seems, contrived to create in this once small and quiet port during a century of wonderful prosperity. And consider this, I beseech you—how is it that the experiment of giving these children a fair chance, when it is tried (as it has been in these schools) has succeeded? I do not wonder, of course, that it has succeeded, for I know Who made these children, and Who redeemed them, and Who cares for them more than you or I, or their best friends, can care for them. But do you not see that the very fact of their having improved, when they had a fair chance, is proof positive that they had not had a fair chance before? How is that, my friends?
And this leads me to ask you plainly—what do you consider to be your duty toward those children; what is your duty toward those dangerous and degraded classes, from which too many of them spring? You all know the parable of the Good Samaritan. You all know how he found the poor wounded Jew by the wayside; and for the mere sake of their common humanity, simply because he was a man, though he would have scornfully disclaimed the name of brother, bound up his wounds, set him on his own beast, led him to an inn, and took care of him.
Is yours the duty which the good Samaritan felt?—the duty of mere humanity? How is it your duty to deal, then, with these poor children? That, and I think a little more. Let me say boldly, I think these children have a deeper and a nearer claim on you; and that you must not pride yourselves, here in Liverpool, on acting the good Samaritan, when you help a ragged school. We do not read that the good Samaritan was a merchant, on his march, at the head of his own caravan. We do not read that the wounded man was one of his own servants, or a child of one of his servants, who had been left behind, unable from weakness or weariness to keep pace with the rest, and had dropped by the wayside, till the vultures and the jackals should pick his bones. Neither do we read that he was a general, at the head of an advancing army, and that the poor sufferer was one of his own rank and file, crippled by wounds or by disease, watching, as many a poor soldier does, his comrades march past to victory, while he is left alone to die. Still less do we hear that the sufferer was the child of some poor soldier’s wife, or even of some drunken camp-follower, who had lost her place on the baggage-waggon, and trudged on with the child at her back, through dust and mire, till, in despair, she dropped her little one, and left it to the mercies of the God who gave it her.
In either case, that good Samaritan would have known what his duty was. I trust that you will know, in like case, what your duty is. For is not this, and none other, your relation to these children in your streets, ragged, dirty, profligate, sinking and perishing, of whom our Lord has said—“It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish?” It is not His will. I am sure that it is not your will either. I believe that, with all my heart. I do not blame you, or the people of Liverpool, nor the people of any city on earth, in our present imperfect state of civilisation, for the existence among them of brutal, ignorant, degraded, helpless people. It is no one’s fault, just because it is every one’s fault—the fault of the system. But it is not the will of God; and therefore the existence of such an evil is proof patent and sufficient that we have not yet discovered the whole will of God about this matter; that we have not yet mastered the laws of true political economy, which (like all other natural laws) are that will of God revealed in facts. Our processes are hasty, imperfect, barbaric—and their result is vast and rapid production: but also waste, refuse, in the shape of a dangerous class. We know well how, in some manufactures, a certain amount of waste is profitable—that it pays better to let certain substances run to refuse, than to use every product of the manufacture; as in a steam mill, where it pays better not to consume the whole fuel, to let the soot escape, though every atom of soot is so much wasted fuel. So it is in our present social system. It pays better, capital is accumulated more rapidly, by wasting a certain amount of human life, human health, human intellect, human morals, by producing and throwing away a regular percentage of human soot—of that thinking, acting dirt, which lies about, and, alas! breeds and perpetuates itself in foul alleys and low public houses, and all dens and dark places of the earth.
But, as in the case of the manufactures, the Nemesis comes, swift and sure. As the foul vapours of the mine and the manufactory destroy vegetation and injure health, so does the Nemesis fall on the world of man; so does that human soot, these human poison gases, infect the whole society which has allowed them to fester under its feet.
Sad, but not hopeless! Dark, but not without a gleam of light on the horizon! For I can conceive a time when, by improved chemical science, every foul vapour which now escapes from the chimney of a manufactory, polluting the air, destroying the vegetation, shall be seized, utilised, converted into some profitable substance; till the black country shall be black no longer, the streams once more crystal clear, the trees once more luxuriant, and the desert which man has created in his haste and greed shall, in literal fact, once more blossom as the rose. And just so can I conceive a time when, by a higher civilisation, formed on a political economy more truly scientific, because more truly according to the will of God, our human refuse shall be utilised, like our material refuse, when man, as man, even down to the weakest and most ignorant, shall be found to be (as he really is) so valuable, that it will be worth while to preserve his health, to develop his capabilities, to save him alive, body, intellect, and character, at any cost; because men will see that a man is, after all, the most precious and useful thing on the earth, and that no cost spent on the development of human beings can possibly be thrown away.
I appeal, then, to you, the commercial men of Liverpool, if there are any such in this congregation. If not, I appeal to their wives and daughters, who are kept in wealth, luxury, refinement, by the honourable labours of their husbands, fathers, brothers, on behalf of this human soot. Merchants are (and I believe that they deserve to be) the leaders of the great caravan, which goes forth to replenish the earth and subdue it. They are among the generals of the great army which wages war against the brute powers of nature all over the world, to ward off poverty and starvation from the ever-teeming millions of mankind. Have they no time—I take for granted that they have the heart—to pick up the footsore and weary, who have fallen out of the march, that they may rejoin the caravan, and be of use once more? Have they no time—I am sure they have the heart—to tend the wounded and the fever-stricken, that they may rise and fight once more? If not, then must not the pace of their march be somewhat too rapid, the plan of their campaign somewhat precipitate and ill-directed, their ambulance train and their medical arrangements somewhat defective? We are all ready enough to complain of waste of human bodies, brought about by such defects in the British army. Shall we pass over the waste, the hereditary waste of human souls, brought about by similar defects in every great city in the world?
Waste of human souls, human intellects, human characters—waste, saddest of all, of the image of God in little children. That cannot be necessary. There must be a fault somewhere. It cannot be the will of God that one little one should perish by commerce, or by manufacture, any more than by slavery, or by war.
As surely as I believe that there is a God, so surely do I believe that commerce is the ordinance of God; that the great army of producers and distributors is God’s army. But for that very reason I must believe that the production of human refuse, the waste of human character, is not part of God’s plan; not according to His ideal of what our social state should be; and therefore what our social state can be. For God asks no impossibilities of any human being.
But as things are, one has only to go into the streets of this, or any great city, to see how we, with all our boasted civilisation, are, as yet, but one step removed from barbarism. Is that a hard word? Why, there are the barbarians around us at every street corner! Grown barbarians—it may be now all but past saving—but bringing into the world young barbarians, whom we may yet save, for God wishes us to save them. It is not the will of their Father which is in heaven that one of them should perish. And for that very reason He has given them capabilities, powers, instincts, by virtue of which they need not perish. Do not deceive yourselves about the little dirty, offensive children in the street. If they be offensive to you, they are not to Him who made them. “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, That in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.” Is there not in every one of them, as in you, the Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world? And know you not Who that Light is, and what He said of little children? Then, take heed, I say, lest you despise one of these little ones. Listen not to the Pharisee when he says, Except the little child be converted, and become as I am, he shall in nowise enter into the kingdom of heaven. But listen to the voice of Him who knew what was in man, when He said, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Their souls are like their bodies, not perfect, but beautiful enough, and fresh enough, to shame any one who shall dare to look down on them. Their souls are like their bodies, hidden by the rags, foul with the dirt of what we miscall civilisation. But take them to the pure stream, strip off the ugly, shapeless rags, wash the young limbs again, and you shall find them, body and soul, fresh and lithe, graceful and capable—capable of how much, God alone who made them knows. Well said of such, the great Christian poet of your northern hills—
“Not in entire forgetfulness,And not in utter nakedness,But trailing clouds of glory do we comeFrom God, who is our home.”
Truly, and too truly, alas! he goes on to say—
“Shades of the prison-house begin to closeUpon the growing boy.”
Will you let the shades of that prison-house of mortality be peopled with little save obscene phantoms? Truly, and too truly, he goes on—
“The youth, who daily further from the eastMust travel, still is Nature’s priest,And by the vision splendid,Is on his way attended.”
Will you leave the youth to know nature only in the sense in which an ape or a swine knows it; and to conceive of no more splendid vision than that which he may behold at a penny theatre? Truly again, and too truly, he goes on—
“At length the man perceives it die away,And fade into the light of common day.”
Yes, to weak, mortal man the prosaic age of manhood must needs come, for good as well as for evil. But will you let that age be—to any of your fellow citizens—not even an age of rational prose, but an age of brutal recklessness; while the light of common day, for him, has sunk into the darkness of a common sewer?
And all the while it was not the will of their Father in heaven that one of these little ones should perish. Is it your will, my friends; or is it not? If it be not, the means of saving them, or at least the great majority of them, is easier than you think. Circumstances drag downward from childhood, poor, weak, fallen, human nature. Circumstances must help it upward again once more. Do your best to surround the wild children of Liverpool with such circumstances as you put round your own children. Deal with them as you wish God to deal with your beloved. Remember that, as the wise man says, the human plant, like the vegetable, thrives best in light; and you will discover, by the irresistible logic of facts, by the success of your own endeavours, by seeing these young souls grow, and not wither, live, and not die—that it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.
On the illness or the Prince of Wales.
Chapel Royal,St James’s,December17th, 1871.
2 Sam. xix. 14. “He bowed the heart of all the men of Judah, even as the heart of one man.”
No circumstances can be more different, thank God, than those under which the heart of the men of Judah was bowed when their king commander appealed to them, and those which have, in the last few days, bowed the heart of this nation as the heart of one man. But the feeling called out in each case was the same—Loyalty, spontaneous, contagious, some would say unreasoning: but it may be all the deeper and nobler, because for once it did not wait to reason, but was content to be human, and to feel.
If those men who have been so heartily loyal of late—respectable, business-like, manful persons, of a race in nowise given to sentimental excitement—had been asked the cause of the intense feeling which they have shown during the last few days, they would probably, most of them, find some difficulty in giving it. Many would talk frankly of their dread lest business should be interfered with; and no shame to them, if they live by business. Others would speak of possible political complications; and certainly no blame to them for dreading such. But they would most of them speak, as frankly, of a deeper and less selfish emotion. They would speak, not eloquently it may be, but earnestly, of sympathy with a mother and a wife; of sympathy with youth and health fighting untimely with disease and death—they would plead their common humanity, and not be ashamed to have yielded to that touch of nature, which makes the whole world kin. And that would be altogether to their honour. Honourably and gracefully has that sympathy showed itself in these realms of late. It has proved that in spite of all our covetousness, all our luxury, all our frivolity, we are not cynics yet, nor likely, thanks be to Almighty God, to become cynics; that however encrusted and cankered with the cares and riches of this world, and bringing, alas, very little fruit to perfection, the old British oak is sound at the root—still human, still humane.
But there is, I believe, another and an almost deeper reason for the strong emotion which has possessed these men; one most intimately bound up with our national life, national unity, national history; one which they can hardly express to themselves; one which some of them are half ashamed to express, because they cannot render a reason for it; but which is still there, deeply rooted in their souls; one of those old hereditary instincts by which the histories of whole nations, whole races, are guided, often half-unconsciously, and almost in spite of themselves; and that is Loyalty, pure and simple Loyalty—the attachment to some royal race, whom they conceived to be set over them by God. An attachment, mark it well, founded not on their own will, but on grounds very complex, and quite independent of them; an attachment which they did not make, but found; an attachment which their forefathers had transmitted to them, and which they must transmit to their children as a national inheritance,—at once a symbol of and a support to the national unity of the whole people, running back to the time when, in dim and mythic ages, it emerged into the light of history as a wandering tribe. This instinct, as a historic fact, has been strong in all the progressive European nations; especially strong in the Teutonic; in none more than in the English and the Scotch. It has helped to put them in the forefront of the nations. It has been a rallying point for all their highest national instincts. Their Sovereign was to them the divinely appointed symbol of the unity of their country. In defending him, they defended it. It did not interfere, that instinct of loyalty, with their mature manhood, freedom, independence. They knew that if royalty were indeed God’s ordinance, it had its duties as well as its rights. And when their kings broke the law, they changed their kings. But a king they must have, for their own sakes; not merely for the sake of the nation’s security and peace, but for the sake of their own self-respect. They felt, those old forefathers of ours, that loyalty was not a degrading, but an ennobling influence; that a free man can give up his independence without losing it; that—as the example of that mighty German army has just shown an astounded world—independence is never more called out than by subordination; and that a free man never feels himself so free as when obeying those whom the laws of his country have set over him; an able man never feels himself so able as when he is following the lead of an abler man than himself. And what if, as needs must happen at whiles, the sovereign were not a man, but a woman or a child? Then was added to loyalty in the hearts of our forefathers, and of many another nation in Europe, an instinct even deeper, and tenderer, and more unselfish—the instinct of chivalry; and the widowed queen, or the prince, became to them a precious jewel committed to their charge by the will of their forefathers and the providence of God; an heirloom for which they were responsible to God, and to their forefathers, and to their children after them, lest their names should be stained to all future generations by the crime of baseness toward the weak.
This was the instinct of the old Teutonic races. They were often unfaithful to it—as all men are to their higher instincts; and fulfilled it very imperfectly—as all men fulfil their duties. But it was there—in their heart of hearts. It helped to make them; and, therefore, it helped to make us. It ennobled them; it called out in them the sense of unity, order, discipline, and a lofty and unselfish affection. And I thank God, as an Englishman, for any event, however exquisitely painful, which may call out those true graces in us, their descendants. And, therefore, my good friends, if any cynic shall sneer, as he may, after the present danger is past, at this sudden outburst of loyalty, and speak of it as unreasoning and childish, answer not him. “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” But answer yourselves, and answer too your children, when they ask you what has moved you thus—answer, I say, not childishly, but childlike: “We have gone back, for a moment at least, to England’s childhood—to the mood of England when she was still young. And we are showing thereby that we are not yet decayed into old age. That if we be men, and not still children, yet the child is father to the man; and the child’s heart still beats underneath all the sins and all the cares and all the greeds of our manhood.”
More than one foreign nation is looking on in wonder and in envy at that sight. God grant that they may understand all that it means. God grant that they may understand of how wide and deep an application is the great law, “Except ye be converted,” changed, and turned round utterly, “and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” God grant that they may recover the childlike heart, and replace with it that childish heart which pulls to pieces at its own irreverent fancy the most ancient and sacred institutions, to build up ever fresh baby-houses out of the fragments, as a child does with its broken toys.
Therefore, my friends, be not ashamed to have felt acutely. Be not ashamed to feel acutely still, till all danger is past, or even long after all danger is past; when you look back on what might have been, and what it might have brought, ay, must have brought, if not to you, still to your children after you. For so you will show yourselves worthy descendants of your forefathers: so you will show yourselves worthy citizens of this British empire. So you will show yourselves, as I believe, worthy Christian men and women. For Christ, the King of kings and subjects, sends all sorrow, to make us feel acutely. We do not, the great majority of us, feel enough. Our hearts are dull and hard and light, God forgive us; and we forget continually what an earnest, awful world we live in—a whole eternity waiting for us to be born, and a whole eternity waiting to see what we shall do now we are born. Yes; our hearts are dull and hard and light; and, therefore, Christ sends suffering on us to teach us what we always gladly forget in comfort and prosperity—what an awful capacity of suffering we have; and more, what an awful capacity of suffering our fellow-creatures have likewise. We sit at ease too often in a fool’s paradise, till God awakens us and tortures us into pity for the torture of others. And so, if we will not acknowledge our brotherhood by any other teaching, He knits us together by the brotherhood of common suffering.
But if God thus sends sorrow to ennoble us, to call out in us pity, sympathy, unselfishness, most surely does He send for that end such a sorrow as this, which touches in all alike every source of pity, of sympathy, of unselfishness at once. Surely He meant to bow our hearts as the heart of one man; and He has, I trust and hope, done that which He meant to do. God grant that the effect may be permanent. God grant that it may call out in us all an abiding loyalty. God grant that it may fill us with some of that charity which bears all things, hopes all things, believes all things, which rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; and make us thrust aside henceforth, in dignified disgust, the cynic and the slanderer, the ribald and the rebel.
But more. God grant that the very sight of the calamity with which we have stood face to face, may call out in us some valiant practical resolve, which may benefit this whole nation, and bow all hearts as the heart of one man, to do some one right thing. And what right thing? What but the thing which is pointed to by plain and terrible fact, as the lesson which God must mean us to learn, if He means us to learn any, from what has so nearly befallen? Let our hearts be bowed as the heart of one man, to say—that so far as we have power, so help us God, no man, woman, or child in Britain, be he prince or be he beggar, shall die henceforth of preventable disease. Let us repent of and amend that scandalous neglect of the now well-known laws of health and cleanliness which destroys thousands of lives yearly in this kingdom, without need and reason; in defiance alike of science, of humanity, and of our Christian profession. Two hundred thousand persons, I am told, have died of preventable fever since the Prince Consort’s death ten years ago. Is that not a sin to bow our hearts as the heart of one man? Ah, if this foul and needless disease, by striking once at the very highest, shall bring home to us the often told, seldom heeded fact that it is striking perpetually at hundreds among the very lowest, whom we leave to sicken and die in dens unfit for men—unfit for dogs; if this tragedy shall awaken all loyal citizens to demand and to enforce, as a duty to their sovereign, their country, and their God, a sanatory reform in town and country, immediate, wholesale, imperative; if it shall awaken the ministers of religion to preach about that, and hardly aught but that—till there is not a fever ally or a malarious ditch left in any British city;—then indeed this fair and precious life will not have been imperilled in vain, and generations yet unborn will bless the memory of a prince who sickened as poor men sicken, and all but died, as poor men die, that his example—and, it may be hereafter, his exertions—might deliver the poor from dirt, disease, and death.
For him himself I have no fear. We have committed him to God. It may be that he has committed himself to God. It may be that he has already learned lessons which God alone can teach. It may be that those lessons will bring forth hereafter royal fruit right worthy of a royal root. At least we can trust him in God’s hands, and believe that if this great woe was meant to ennoble us it was meant to ennoble him; that if it was meant to educate us it was meant to educate him; that God is teaching him; and that in God’s school-house he is safe. For think, my friends, if we, who know him partly, love him much; then God, who knows him wholly, loves him more. And so God be with him, and with you, and with your prayers for him. Amen.
Chapel Royal,Whitehall. 1865. For the consumptive hospital.
St John ii. 11. “This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee, and manifested forth his glory.”
This word glory, whether in its Greek or its Roman shape, had a very definite meaning in the days of the Apostles. It meant the admiration of men. The Greek word, as every scholar knows, is derived from a root signifying to seem, and expresses that which a man seems, and appears to his fellow men. The Latin word glory is expressly defined by Cicero to mean the love, trust, and admiration of the multitude; and a consequent opinion that the man is worthy of honour. Glory, in fact, is a relative word, and can be only used of any being in relation to other rational beings, and their opinion of him.
The glory of God, therefore, in Scripture, must needs mean that admiration which men feel, or ought to feel for God. There is a deeper, an altogether abysmal meaning for that word: “And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thy own self, with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.” But on that text, speaking of the majesty of the ever-blessed Trinity, I dare not attempt to comment; though, could I explain it, I should. When St. John says that Christ manifested forth His glory, and His disciples believed on Him, it is plain that He means by His glory that which produced admiration and satisfaction, not alone in the mind of God the Father, but in the minds of men.
Now, what the Romans thought glorious in their days is notorious enough. No one can look upon the picture of a Roman triumph without seeing that their idea of glory was force, power, brute force, self-willed dominion, selfish aggrandizement. But this was not the glory which St. John saw in Christ, for His glory was full of grace, which is incompatible with self-will and selfishness.
The Greek’s meaning of glory is equally notorious. He called it wisdom. We call it craft—the glory of the sophist, who could prove or disprove anything for gain or display; the glory of the successful adventurer, whose shrewdness made its market out of the stupidity and vice of the barbarian. But this is not the glory of Christ, for St. John saw that it was full of truth.
Therefore, neither strength nor craft are the glory of Christ; and, therefore, they are not the glory of God. For the glory of Christ is the glory of God, and none other, because He is very God, of very God begotten. In Christ, man sees the unseen, and absolute, and eternal God as He is, was, and ever will be. “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him:”—and that perfectly and utterly; for in Him dwells all the fulness of the Godhead bodily, so that He Himself could say, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” This is the Catholic Faith. God grant that I may believe it with my whole heart. God grant that you may believe it with your whole hearts likewise, and not merely with your intellects and brains.
But, it may be said, though God be not glorious and admirable for selfish force, which it were blasphemous to attribute to Him, He is still admirable for His power. Though He be not glorious for craft, He is still glorious for His wisdom. I deny both. I deny that power is any object of admiration, unless it be used well for good ends. To admire power for its own sake is one of those errors, which has been well called Titanolatry, the worship of giants. Neither is wisdom an object of admiration, unless it be used for good ends. To worship it for its own sake is a common error enough—the idolatry of Intellect. But it is none the less an error, and a grievous one. God’s power and wisdom are glorious only in as far as they are used (as they are utterly) for good ends; only, in plain words, as far as God is (as He is perfectly) good. And the true glory of God is that God is good. So says the Scripture; and so I bid you all remember, for it is a truth which you and I and all mankind are perpetually ready to forget.
Let me but ask you one question as a test whether or not I am right. If the Supreme Being used His power, as the Roman Cæsar used his; if He used His wisdom as the Greek sophist used his, would He be glorious then and worthy of admiration? The old heathen Æschylus answered that question for mankind long ago on the Athenian stage. I should be ashamed to answer it again in a Christian pulpit. And when I saygood, I mean good, even as man can be, and ought to be, and is, more or less, good. The theory that because God’s morality is absolute, it may, therefore, be different from man’s morality, inkindas well as indegree, is equally contrary to the letter and to the spirit of Scripture. Man, according to Scripture, is made in God’s moral image and likeness, and however fallen and degraded that image may be, still the ultimate standard of right and wrong is the same in God and in man. How else dare Abraham ask of God, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” How else has God’s command to the old Jews any meaning, “Be ye holy, for I am holy?” How else have all the passages in the Psalms, Prophets, Evangelists, Apostles, which speak of God’s justice, mercy, faithfulness, any honest or practical meaning to human beings? How else can they be aught but a mockery, a delusion, and a snare to the tens of thousands who have found in them hope and trust, that God would deliver them and the world from evil? What means the command to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect? What mean the words that we partake of a divine nature? How else is the command to love God anything but an arbitrary and impossible demand,—demanding love, which every writer of fiction tells you, and tells you truly, cannot be compelled—can only go forth toward a being who shows himself worthy of our love, by possessing those qualities which we admire in our fellow men? No. Against such a theory I must quote, as embodying all that I would say, and corroborating, on entirely independent ground, the Scriptural account of human morality—against such a theory, I say I must quote the words of our greatest living logician. “Language has no meaning for the words Just, Merciful, Benevolent” (he might have added truthful likewise) “save that in which we predicate them of our fellow creatures; and unless that is what we intend to express by them, we have no business to employ the words. If in affirming them of God we do not mean to affirm these very qualities, differing only as greater in degree, we are neither philosophically nor morally entitled to affirm them at all . . . What belongs to” God’s goodness “as Infinite (or more properly Absolute) I do not pretend to know; but I know that infinite goodness must be goodness, and that what is not consistent with goodness is not consistent with infinite goodness. . . . Besides,” he says—and to this soundreductio ad absurdumI call the attention of all who believe their Bibles—“unless I believe God to possess the same moral attributes which I find, in however inferior a degree, in a good man, what ground of assurance have I of God’s veracity? All trust in a Revelation presupposes a conviction that God’s attributes are the same, in all but degree, with the best human attributes. If, instead of the ‘glad tidings’ that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that ‘the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving’ does not sanction them; convince me of it and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures.”
That St. John would have assented to these bold and honest words, that such is St. John’s conception of human and divine morality, the story in the text shows, to my mind, especially. It is, so to speak, a crucial experiment, by which the truth of the Scripture theory is verified. The difficulty in all ages about a standard of morality has been—How can we fix it? Even if we agree that man’s goodness ought to be the counterpart of God’s goodness, we know that in practice it is not, as mankind has differed in all ages and countries about what is right and wrong. The Hindoo thinks it right to burn widows, wrong to eat animal food; and between such extremes there are numberless minor differences. Hardly any act is conceivable which has not been thought by some man, somewhere, somehow, morally right or morally wrong. If all that we can do is, to choose out those instances of morality which seem to us most right, and impute them to God, shall we not have an ever-shifting, probably a merely conventional standard of right and wrong? And worse—shall we not be always in danger of deifying our own superstitions—perhaps our own vices: of making a God in our own image, because we cannot know that God in whose image we are made? Most true, unless “we believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ,” “perfect God and perfect man.” In Him, says the Bible, the perfect human morality is manifested, and shown by His life and conduct to be identical with the divine. He bids us be perfect even as our Father in heaven is perfect; and He only has a right—in the sense of a sound and fair reason—for so doing; because He can say, and has said, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”
At least, such is the doctrine of St. John. He tells us that the Word, who was God, was made flesh, and dwelt in his land and neighbourhood; and that he and his fellows beheld His glory; and saw that it was the glory of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And then, in the next chapter, he goes on to tell us how that glory was first manifested forth—by turning water into wine at a marriage feast. On the truth of the story, I say simply, in passing, that I believe it fully and literally; as I do also St. John’s assertions about our Lord’s Divinity. But I only wish to point out to you why I called this miracle the crucial experiment, which proved God’s goodness to be identical with that which we call (and rightly) goodness in man. It is by the seeming insignificance thereof, by the seeming non-necessity, by the seeming humbleness of its circumstances, by the seeming smallness of its results, issuing merely (as far as Scripture tells us, and therefore as far as we need know, or have a right to imagine) in the giving of a transitory and unnecessary physical pleasure. In short, by the very absence of thatDignus deo vindice nodus, that knot which only a God could untie, which heathens demanded ere a god was allowed to interfere in the plot of a tragedy; which too many who call themselves Christians demand before the living God is allowed to interfere in that world in which without Him not a sparrow falls to the ground. In a moral case of this kind, if you will consider, that which seems least is often the greatest. That which seems the lowest, because the simplest and meanest manifestation of a moral law, may be—probably is—the deepest, the highest, the most universal.
Life is made up of little things, say the practically wise, and they say true, for our Lord says so likewise. “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.” If you look on morality, virtue, goodness, holiness, sanctification—call it what you will—as merely the obligation of anexternallaw, you will be tempted to say, “Let me be faithful to it in its greater and more important cases, and that is enough. The pettier ones must take care of themselves, I have not time enough to attend to them, and God will not, it may be, require them of me.” But if the morality, goodness, holiness be in you what it was in Christ, without measure—aspirit, even the spirit of God—a spirit within you, possessing you, and working on you, and in you—then that which seems most petty and unimportant will often be most important, the test of the soundness of your heart, of the reality of your feelings.
We all know—every writer of fiction, at least, should know—how true this is in the case of love between man and woman, between parent and child: how the little kindnesses, the half-unconscious gestures, the petty labours of love, of which their object will never be aware, the scrupulousness which is able “to greatly find quarrel in a straw, when honour is at stake,”—how these are the very things which show that the affection is neither the offspring of dry and legal duty, nor of selfish enjoyment, but lies far down in the unconscious abysses of the heart and being itself:—as Christ—to compare (for He Himself permits, nay commands, us to do so in His parables) our littleness with His immensity—as Christ, I say, showed, when He chose first to manifest His glory—the glory of His grace and truth—by increasing for a short hour the pleasures of a village feast.
I might say much more on the point; how He showed these by His truth; how He proved that He, and therefore His Father and your Father, was not thatDeus quidam deceptor, whom some suppose Him, mocking the intellect of His creatures by thefactsof nature which He has created, tempting the souls of His creatures by the very faculties and desires which He Himself has given them.
But I wish now to draw your minds rather to that one wordGrace—Grace, what it means, and how it is a manifestation of glory. Few Scriptural expressions have suffered more that this word Grace from the storms of theological controversy. Springing flesh in the minds of Apostles, as did many other noble words in that heaven-enriched soil, the only adequate expressions of an idea which till then had never fully possessed the mind of man, it meant more than we can now imagine; perhaps more that we shall ever imagine again. We, alas! only know the word with its fragrance battered out, its hues rubbed off, its very life anatomized out of it by the battles of rival divines, till its mere skeleton is left, and all that grace means to most of us is simply and dryly a certain spiritual gift of God. Doubtless it means that; but if it meant nothing more at first, why was not the plain word Gift enough for the Apostles? Why did they use Grace? Why did they use, too, in the sense of giving and gifts, nouns and verbs derived from that root-word,charis, grace, which plainly signified so much to them? A word, the root-meaning of which was neither more nor less than a certain heathen goddess, or goddesses—the inspirer of beauty in art, the impersonation of all that is pure, charming, winning, bountiful—in one word, of all that is graceful and gracious in the human character. The fact is strange, but the fact is there; and being there, we must face it and explain it. Of course, the Apostles use the word grace in a far deeper and loftier meaning; raise it, mathematically speaking, to a far higher power. There is no need to remind you of that. But why did they choose and use the word at all—a word whose old meaning every heathen knew—unless for some innate fitness in it to express something in the character of God? To tell men that there was in God a graciousness, as of the most gracious of all human beings, which gave to His character a moral beauty, a charm, a winningness, which, as even the old Jewish prophet, before the Incarnation, could perceive and boldly declare, drew them with the cords of a man and with the bands of love, attracting them by the very human character of its graciousness.
“The glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace.” Meditate on those words. “Full of grace,”—of that spirit which we, like the old heathens, consider rather a feminine than a masculine excellence; the spirit, which, as St. James says of God the Father, gives simply and upbraideth not; gives gracefully, as we ourselves say—in the right and happy use of the adverb; does not spoil its gifts by throwing them in the teeth of the giver, but gives for mere giving’s sake; pleases where it can be done, without sin or harm, for mere pleasing’s sake; most human and humane when it is most divine; the spirit by which Christ turned the water into wine at the marriage feast, and so manifested forth His absolute and eternal glory. And how? How?
Thus, if you will receive it; if you will believe a truth which is too often hidden from the wise and prudent, and yet revealed unto babes; which will never be understood by the proud Pharisee, the sour fanatic, the ascetic who dreads and distrusts his Father in heaven; but which is clear and simple enough to many a clear and simple heart, honest and single-eyed, sunny itself, and bringing sunshine wherever it comes, because it is inspired by the gracious spirit of God, and delights to show kindness for kindness’ sake, and to make happy for happiness’ sake, taking no merit to itself for doing that, which is as instinctive as its very breath.
This,—that the graciousness which Christ showed at that marriage feast is neither more nor less than the boundless love of God, who could not live alone in the abyss, but must needs, out of His own Divine Charity, create the universe, that He might have somewhat beside Himself whereon to pour out the ocean of His love, which finds its own happiness in giving happiness to all created things, from the loftiest of rational beings down to the gnat which dances in the sun, and for aught we know, to the very lichen which nestles in the Alpine rock.
This is the character of God, unless Scripture be a dream of man’s imagination. Thus far you may know God; thus far you may see God as He is; and know and see that He is just with the justice of a man, only more just; merciful with the mercy of a man, only more merciful; truthful with the truthfulness of a man, only more truthful; gracious with the graciousness of a man, only more gracious; and loving? That we dare not say: for if we say so much, the Scripture commands us to say more. The Scripture tells us that the whole absolute morality of God is summed up—as our own human morality ought to be—in His Love. That love is the fulfilment of the Moral Law in Him as in us; that it is the root and cause and spirit of His justice, mercy, truth, and graciousness; that it belongs not to His attributes, as they may be said to be, but to His essence and His spirit; that we must not, if we be careful of our words, say, God is loving, because we are bidden to say, “God is Love.”
Thus, the commands, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God—and thy neighbour as thyself, are shown to be not arbitrary and impossible demands, miscalled moral obligations, while they are merely legal and external ones; but true moral obligations, in the moral sense, to which heart and spirit can answer, “I rejoice to do thy will, O God; Thy law is within my heart.” You ought to love God, because He is supremely loveable and worthy of your love. You can love God, because you can appreciate and know God; for you are His child, made in His moral likeness, and capable of seeing Him as He is morally, and of seeing in Him the full perfection of all that attracts your moral sense, when it is manifested in any human being. And you can love your neighbour as yourselves, because, and in as far as you have in you the Spirit of God, the spirit of universal love, which proceedeth out for ever both from the Father and the Son to all beings and things which They have made.
And of one thing I am sure, that in proportion as you are led and inspired by that Spirit of God which showed in our Lord, in the very deepest and truest sense, as the spirit of humanity, just so you will feel a genial and hearty pleasure in lessening all human suffering, however slight; in increasing all harmless human pleasure, however transitory; and in copying Him who, at the marriage feast, gracefully and graciously turned the water into wine. I do not, of course, mean that you are to do no more than that; to prefer sentiment to duty, to amuse and glorify yourselves by paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith. But I do mean that you are not to distrust your own sentiments, not to crush your own instinctive sympathies. The very lowest of them—that which makes you shrink at the sight of pain, and rejoice in the sight of pleasure, is not natural, and common to you with the animals; it is supernatural and divine. It is a schoolmaster to bring you to Christ, to that higher inspiration of His, which tells your heart to alleviate the unseen woes which will never come into painful contact with your sensibilities, to bestow pleasures in which you yourself have no immediate share. It will tell your hearts especially in the case of this very Hospital for Consumption not to be slack in giving, because so much of what you will give—it is painful to recollect how much—will be spent, not in prevention, not even in cure, but in mere alleviation, mere increased bodily ease, mere savoury food, even mere passing amusements for wearied minds. Be it so. If (which God forbid) we could do nothingsavealleviate; if (which God forbid) permanent cure, even lengthening of life, were impossible, I should say just as much, Give. Give money to alleviate; give, even though what you give were, in the strictly economic sense,wasted. We are ready enough, most of us, to waste upon ourselves. It is well for us to taste once in a way the luxury of wasting on others; though I have yet to learn that anything can be called wasted which lessens, even for a moment, the amount of human suffering. A plan, for instance, is on foot for sending twenty of the patients to Madeira for the winter. The British Consul, to his honour, guarantees their maintenance, if the Hospital will pay their passage out and home. Some may say—An unnecessary expense—a problematical benefit. Be it so. I believe that it will not be such; that it may save many lives—they may revive: but were it not so, I would still say Give. Let them go, even if every soul in that ship were doomed. Let them go. Let them drink the fresh sea breeze before they die; let them see the green tropic world; let them forget their sorrow for a while; let them feel springing up afresh in them the celestial fount of hope. We let the guilty criminal eat and drink well the morn ere he is led forth to die—shall we not do as much by those who are innocent?
But especially would I say, try to lessen such suffering as that for which I plead to-day, because it is undeserved in the true sense of that word—not earned by any act of their own. These poor souls suffer for no sins of their own; they have done nothing to bring on themselves a disease which attacks too often the fairest, the seemingly strongest and healthiest, the most temperate and most pure. They suffer, some it may be for the sins of their forefathers, some from causes of disease which science cannot as yet control, cannot even discover. They are objects of unmixed pity and sympathy: they should be so to us; for they are so to Him who made them. On this disease God does bestow a special alleviation—a special mark of His pity, of His tenderness, in a word of His grace. That unclouded intellect, that unruffled temper, that cheerful resignation, that brave and yet calm facing of the inevitable future, that ever-fresh hope, which is no delusion but a token that God Himself has taken away the sting of death and the victory of the grave, till the very thought of death has vanished, or is looked on merely as the gate to a life of health, and strength, and peace, and joy:—all these symptoms, so common, so normal, all but universal—this Euthanasia which God has provided for those who, humanly speaking, are innocent, yet must, for the general good of humanity, leave this world for another;—what are they but the voice of God to us, telling that He loves, that He pities, that He alleviates; and bidding us go and do likewise? God has alleviated where we cannot. He has bidden us thereby, if His likeness and spirit be indeed in us, to alleviate where we can; and believe that by every additional comfort, however petty, which we provide, we are copying the Ideal Man, who, because He was very God of very God, could condescend, at the marriage feast, to turn the water into wine.