"By faith Joseph, when he died, made mention of the departing of the children of Israel; and gave commandment concerning his bones."—Heb.xi. 22.
FAITH is a word that we hear a great deal of in theological exposition and in religious teaching. It is a good thing constantly to remind ourselves of what its actual meaning is. The 11th chapter of this Epistle begins with a definition of faith, and then gives examples of it. The definition is a little hard to understand; nobody can misunderstand the illustrations. According to the inspired writer, faith is recognising the will of God, taking it and doing it; that is faith, and nothing else is—no theories about God, no rules, and laws, and definitions about God's government of the world, no intellectual adherence to any explanation of theology. Faith, real and living, means that the God who comes into contact with you in your life and your world has a will, and shows it to you. If you bow down before that actual will of God, that it may save you from your real sins, and that He may use you in saving the dead around you; if you adore it, and worship it, and account it the best thing in your life, and give yourself up to it, as the one thing worthdoing, though there be many a forsaking and many a return to God, if you hold on through your life, doing the will of God, then you are a man of faith.
Joseph was a man of faith, in the olden times, all his life long. From his very boyhood he had possessed faith. In the dreams that came to him as a lad he welcomed God's face, not quite understanding all He meant, and a little misusing the high vocation that came to him, accepting it in the pride of his heart. In his trials and his prosperity, in his public career, in his private home life, on his death-bed, he lived with God, reckoned with God, and loved God, and tried to do God's will on the earth. One deed stands out supreme and stupendous. Joseph on his dying bed looked forward into the future, and there, amidst the mists, discerned the promise of the world's redemption, forecast the coming of God's kingdom on earth, and chose what to him was the greatest and grandest thing in his dying, and so gave commandment for the burying of his bones away in distant Canaan.
I am going to ask you to follow me as I rapidly sketch the great outstanding elements of struggle and triumph in Joseph's career, in order that I may show you the splendid feature of faith, and that in dying he was still loyal to the dreams of his youth. Joseph was a younger son. He had the misfortune to be his father's favourite; he was exempted from hard toil; he was kept near his old father; his brethren hated him for it; probably he misbehaved himself; he was no saint, else there would be no good in my preaching about him. He had the misfortune to be spoiled by his father. He had intelligence, and he was wide awake; but there was nothing in the early years of the lad to give evidence of any extraordinary ability, or to forecastany splendid career for him, with the exception of one thing: Joseph was a great dreamer in his sleep; and as a boy he woke up from his sleep, and saw visions, glorious castles in the air; and they were not all floating away in cloudland, high up above him, but he sawhimselfin them; they had an intense personal interest for him. Perhaps he was very injudicious, and probably disagreeable, in the tone and fashion of telling these dreams to his brothers. Their sheaves in the harvest gathered round and made obeisance to his sheaf; the meaning plainly being that he was to rise to great power, that he would hold them in his hand, and be lord and master over them. They might not have much interest for us; but Joseph belonged to a family that believed that they held a unique position in the world's history, and that they were to bring a great blessing into this world. They had not grasped exactly what it was, nor understood the significance of the spiritual kingdom of heaven; but none the less they heard God's voice around them, so that this world became to them a place in which He lived and moved: thus they rose to the grandeur of the conception that they were to have a master hand in carving the fortunes of the world. Out of many of his brethren, God had selected Joseph to be an inheritor and administrator of the Divine purpose of blessing to the world, and to do unique deeds of valour for the kingdom of God.
Now I have said that the one remarkable thing about Joseph's boyhood, the one thing that might excite your expectation about his future, was that he dreamt dreams; he was a great dreamer in his youth. I can understand many a shrewd, practical man saying that that was not much to his credit: "A lad that is always dreaming dreams will not do much." Quite true, ifthe one, the only purpose of life is to eat and drink and to gather all the dirt together with the muck-rake; but if man has a Divine destiny in him, if man lives in two worlds—a world that you see with your eyes, a world where money is current, and another world where your sovereigns are worth nothing, a world of truth and honour, generosity, love, goodness, self-denial, moral achievement and victory, then it comes to a great deal; it means very much for a boy's future if he has dreams that are not of earth, but of heaven. There are dreams and dreams. There are dreams that come of laziness, idleness, selfishness, and over-feeding, gross nightmares, fit for swine; dreams coming of self-indulgence and worldliness, poor grovelling things; a man's mind is not much better forthem. There are dreams that are born of a back-boneless sentimentality, of sweet mock chivalry, that loves to represent itself in pretty pictures; not much good comes of them. But there are other dreams, that come out of a man's wide-awake activity; dreams that are the vapours rising from a fervent spirit, from the cooling of the machinery. They work out the character that God is weaving in that lad or in that young girl. These dreams are prophetic; they have something of heaven in them; they are something higher than the common: from God they come; they are the threads and fibres by which He would lead us on to do great deeds on earth, and at last receive us as faithful and good servants of our Master. I do believe in the dreams of youth, that come in at that window which is open heavenward in every young soul, until the dust and dirt of earth cloud it over; the dreams of romance, that stupid old people try to crush and drive out, and that the world puts its heel upon; those dreams of friendship and honour, of truth and purity,to be chosen rather than worldly gain; those dreams of love, generous and tender, that shall make two lives knit together into one of exceptional tenderness and goodness. There is the breath of heaven here; these are the golden glows in the mists of life's morning, that come from God, and are the guarantees of a splendid sunset on earth, and beyond, a brighter dawn in heaven. Would to God that all of us, when we are old men and women, may be able to think without shame and remorse about the dreams of our youth; that the woman has been true to her dreams, and has fulfilled the sweet, unselfish ideals of her girlhood, and been a noble, loving wife and mother; that the lad has come through this world, at least comparatively unspotted, with a heart fresh and tender, not eaten up by selfishness and greed, with a clean conscience, with the benediction in his old age of having made other men happy and good. Oh, the worst enemies of your dying bed, that will come to mock you, will be the dreams of your youth, of your boyhood and girlhood, should they be unfulfilled! But if you can only in part realise them in your life they will be angels that will come to comfort you.
There is a great deal more dreaming done in this world than we dull, prosaic, old people will allow. It is not merely the lads and girls that dream, for the fact is that we do not know how much we ourselves dream; both young and old do it, but with a difference: the young folks mostly dream about themselves, and the old folks are tired of dreaming about themselves; but there are the wonderful dreams in the hearts of fathers and mothers, to keep their children pure and good, and to make them happy. What would the world be without those sweet, loving dreams? Thank God for them!How much it means for the boy and the girl that their mother dreamt noble things for them when they were young! There never was a man yet that came to be a very great or good man in God's world but his mother dreamt how he was to be brave, true, generous, loving, helpful to others; and because her dreams came from God, she prayed for that son that he might be good, and brave, and noble, and the lad grew great because his mother dreamt great things for him.
There is a sad experience that almost all young folks must come to: the day which breaks so shiningly, with such sweet promise of goodness, nearly always clouds over and grows dark and stormy; the dreams get broken, the dreams that hover over you and seem so easy to reach, recede farther and farther, like one of those Alpine peaks when you are trying to climb it. From the village you start from, you see a peak which you think must be the summit, but when you reach it, it is only to find yourself separated from a far higher ridge by a valley, which you have to descend in order to reach it, and you have no sooner climbed up again than you realise that this, again, is but an intermediate peak. How toilsome, how weary it is! but in the same way dreams would be worth nothing if you had not to win them by struggle and battle. It is the tedium of the contest, I suppose, that disheartens most. It is not easy for young hearts to wait for the fulfilment of life's promise till it can be achieved honestly. Joseph is trapped in a pit, betrayed by his brethren, sold to slave-merchants, settled in an Egyptian house, becomes the bond-slave of Potiphar, torn from father, from his own country, from his God, Who had not interfered to protect him, a bond-slave, his dignity gone, all the pride of life gone! Would it have been wonderful if all theheart had gone out of him too—if he had said that God had forgotten him—"My dreams were a delusion; there is nothing worth living for"? Are there young men and women here whose hearts are aching very bitterly, and who are tempted to think that there is no outlet to this slavery of life? How did Joseph look at it? He might have broken down, and got wild with despair, and said to himself, "I will become demoralised;" but though he lay down at night tired, yet he was cheerful, and still dreamt his old dreams, and God was over him. If a man is true to himself and to his God he will come through anything; if he will be man enough, if he will not be beaten, if he will make the best of things, hemustconquer. So presently Joseph reached a better position, things began to look up a little, his master marked his spirit, and made him his chief slave.
A lad who had dreamt of being a ruler and king of men, so that his father would bow before him for what he could do for him, how terrible it must have been for the boy to be sold as a slave! How terribly he must have been tempted to say, "God has deceived me; He made me to dream dreams, and here I am left in a dungeon, a slave: I cannot get what I want honourably; I will get it dishonourably; I will snatch the fruit of life, even if it be in defiance of what God and good men call right"! That is the temptation that drives many a lad to dishonesty and treachery, and many a girl to bitterness and sin. It came to Joseph in the deadliest form. The mistress of the household made overtures to him which, had he accepted them, would have meant immediate promotion, perhaps to the court; for her husband was the chief of Pharaoh's body-guard. Could there have been devised a deadlier temptation for that poor, homeless boy, so treacherouslytreated by those who should have loved him—who had dreamt such dreams, and had such proud ambitions, and withal no danger of discovery if he would but take the path that opened up the way of promotion? I think that was the crisis in Joseph's life; that was the supreme deed which determined his destiny. Then it was that he had to stand, and stand for ever, for God and good, or to fall and sink for ever into ruin. And what saved him? I will tell you what saved him. When Fortune tells a clerk that he has but to take a little of his master's money, which he can repay very soon, and she will smile on him, what he will do all depends upon his past. Those dreams of Joseph's meant everything to him at that great moment. If his dreams had been of the flesh, if his dreams had been base, and selfish, and sordid, and of grasping the world's gains, honourably if possible, but anyway grasping them, he could not have stood. But that boy had dreamt of being a prince, a king among men; he had dreamt of a noble, stainless manhood, of self-respect, and honour, and truth; and he had dreamt of God caring about him, of God choosing him to be His instrument in this world; he was a lad in whose soul the whispers of childhood's prayers and of morning devotions murmured, with sweet echoes of heaven. A lad on whose head still rests the soft pressure of the blessing of his Father in heaven is no game for the devil. Joseph turned from that temptation without a moment's faltering; he said to himself, "Be a traitor and a knave! stain my soul and my manhood with this foul lust!"—and in the presence and the sight of God he conquered; he was loyal to the dreams of his youth, and the result was that he went to prison.
Young men and women, do you sigh? You wouldfight the battles of life bravely enough, and resist its temptations, if there were a fair field and no favour; but treachery and dishonesty are saturating everything. It is not the best men who get the best wages. The whole city is full of cheating. I am afraid it is so, for many good men have told me they could hardly keep their hands clean. When you hear of a lad going to the bad, for God's sake be just; be not hard on him; it is but the common immorality tolerated everywhere. But what of that? Are you going to lose your life, and stain your conscience, because another has injured you? So long as you do not injure yourself, never mind; be a man in the image of God.
If you come nearer and nearer to that standard it will be a grander work to do in your lifetime, if you live in a poor lodging-room till your death, than to become a millionaire by injustice or cruelty. In prison Joseph played the man; he was not broken nor dispirited. And remember what I said about dreams. Those dreams of his did not allow him to lie down idly in the prison; he wanted to do everybody's work. Joseph was industrious, and kept working on because of his dreams. The keeper of the prison was evidently a man who was glad to have things managed for him; and Joseph got promoted in a wonderful way till he reached the royal court, and aided by perseverance and intelligence and an untarnished character, he became the premier, the first prince in the land. And now followed—what, do you think? Prosperity, peace, ease? No; immense responsibility, discharged nobly by Joseph, and perilous temptations. When a man has overcome the temptations of adversity I can tell him that he has fought a splendid battle, but thedeadliest are those that come in the days of prosperity. The generous deeds that you thought you would do, when you were a poor clerk, if you were only wealthy—the help to churches, to missions, to the poor, where are they? You know the story told in all the collection sermons about a man who gave liberally when he was poor, but did not give in the same proportion when he grew rich, and explained it by saying that when he was poor he had a guinea heart, but now it was a penny heart! But Joseph conquers once more. He loves his cruel brothers tenderly, and he brings them, with the old father, to the land of plenty, and tends them. What was his temptation? It comes out later on, and with it the reason why he triumphed over it. While the old man lived the brothers that had betrayed Joseph were safe, because of his love to his father; but when he dies the brothers are fearful lest Joseph should wreak his vengeance on them, and so they come with their whining lie to him; the old father had told them, they say, to implore Joseph to be still generous to them. Joseph burst into tears to think that his brethren had judged so meanly of him. But to do these men justice, we must confess that the average man would act as they did. How came it that Joseph had preserved the heart of his boyhood amid his Egyptian prosperity? Men and women, do you want to know the secret of a pure and loving life? Do you want to know the magic formula that will lift you up and ennoble your character, so that it will not occur to you to pay off old wrongs when you get the chance, the formula that will make you a blessing to others? It is to open your heart wide to the sight, and the touch, and the presence of God in your life and in your world. When I hear wise men, andmen that mean the world good, telling us that we shall be able to preserve morality when we have ceased to believe that Jesus had a Father in heaven, when we believe that we live our little day, and then die and vanish, and the world goes on as well without us, my heart sickens within me. Tell men and women that they are the highest race of beasts, and what motives have they for being generous and doing noble deeds? Take away the good Jesus, take away the great high heaven with its sunshine, crush down a low roof over our earth, and you crush out life's grandeur. Tell men that every human spirit has in it something mysterious, that death means something awful, that their souls are born for eternity; then life becomes great and solemn, and the great thought arises that we are born to be the sons of God.
And now the last thing in Joseph's life. I think that when he died all men and women in Egypt were talking about him, and I am pretty sure they talked about him as much in a mistaken fashion and with as many blunders as people will talk about you and me when we die. There is no man that ever lived yet that was known to the world; God only knows what we are; so when we die they are bound to speak of us better or worse than we deserve, for they will not know you nor me as we are known to God, as we have lived, and what has been our purpose in life, how earnestly we have striven for it; these are known to God, and to Him only. Thank God, there are more merciful judgments up there in heaven about us than the kindest on earth will deliver. I am pretty sure that the Egyptians all said that Joseph would be proud to be buried in Egypt. He had lived very nearly all his life there. Had he not brought his relatives there? Was he not engrossed,heart and soul, in Egypt, with not a particle of interest left for the old land, the old home, and the old life? We may imagine what would have been the exclamations of astonishment if the Egyptians could have listened at the dying bed of the prince and statesman, and have heard that while all the time he had been a loyal servant to his royal master, his heart was nevertheless away in the land of his boyhood, and that the future he was looking for was not a future of immortality among the Egyptian dead. "Promise me this one thing," he says, "that when God takes you back to the sweet dear land, back to make God's kingdom there, you will take all that is left of me, that you will take my bones out of this Egypt, where I have been in body, but never in spirit." Oh, the grandeur of such an utterance! All the Egyptian greatness, power in one of the mightiest empires the world has ever seen, is as nothing to him compared with the power that his dreams of sweetness, and goodness, and the service of God had over him. That is a life that is not broken in two when death comes.
Men and women here, who have said your prayers when you were young, and have stopped praying now; who have gone into society and given yourselves up to the world, stop and look at your poor broken life, and before it is too late come back to where in your childhood you knelt at God's throne.
Oh, young men and women that have dreamed Joseph's dreams, pray to God that you may dream the dreams of your childhood once more, if you have let the lust and greed of the world into your heart! Old men and women, for whom this world is not long, go back to your childhood, and end your life as you began it.
This is the supreme thought (and I like to end with it, for it is a comforting thought too) in the story of Joseph's life; because I know that there are so many lives crippled and broken through their own fault, as well as through the wrongs and injuries of others; lives dark, and poor, and disappointing; lives that have no triumph in this world, and find it very hard to keep up heart, to keep true to hope, and faith, and God. Listen to the lesson of Joseph's life. No true life of goodness to man and God can ever be a failure. In a pit, in a dungeon in far-off Egypt, you may seem to be shut out of all splendid achievements; wronged and smitten by the storms of life, it may seem as if God had left you; but if you can only keep your heart sweet, and good, and pure; if you can but keep yourself honourable, and generous, and loving, then, though God may give you no ties of home life, and all may appear dark and cheerless; if you can only keep yourself a good, sweet, loving woman, a brave, true, honourable man, if you can but hold fast to your faith, there is a great God over you, there is a Christ who came to die to save you, there is a holiness which God will give you. If you will but hold fast to the end—toHisend,—then your life cannot be a failure; its roots are in God, and its end shall be with God; from heaven you came, and to God you shall return.
[1]Preached on Sunday evening, October 20th, 1889, in St. John's Wood Presbyterian Church.
[1]Preached on Sunday evening, October 20th, 1889, in St. John's Wood Presbyterian Church.
"He [Hezekiah] removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan."—2 Kingsxviii. 4.
IN that verse we hear the last of the brazen serpent; this morning I am going to put before you some practical thoughts that spring from the whole story. What has the brazen serpent got to do with our modern life? The children of Israel, with their cattle and sheep, wandering about the wilderness, get sick of it, complain against God and against Moses, and are ready to break into active rebellion. They are punished by a sudden attack of venomous serpents that sting them, and they, in dread of death, lose that sham courage of theirs and independence, and they appeal to God to save them. He bids Moses manufacture a mysterious brazen serpent, put it upon a pole, and then, if any dying Israelite looks at that serpent it heals him. The brazen image is regarded ever after as clothed with great sanctity. It was once the supernatural channel of life direct from God to dying men, and so, in course of time, men came to it, and in its vicinity offered up their prayers, and finally burned incense to it, and surrounded it with a false worship. Then comes a reforming king, who regards that symbol of wonderfulold power Divine and goodness, that has been turned into an idolatrous and superstitious instrument of human degradation; and, divided between his respect for it and his consciousness of the mischief it is doing, he finally decides to break it into pieces, scatters it into the dust, and there is an end of it. Now, what has all that got to do with your life and mine? The Hebrew history does not have its meaning lying just on the face of it. If you take the bare letter you will not get much out of it; if you stick to the bare letter you will find yourself landed in a great many difficulties that are puzzling good people and bad people at the present day, and all the time, whether you attack those difficulties with a profound faith or with a doubting, critical, sceptical spirit, you may be missing the very heart of the story. Because Hebrew history is manifestly history written with a purpose. It was never intended that it should be taken as an exact reporter's chronicle of external things that happen. The real interest of the writers is something different; it is to get down below the surface, in behind the scenes, to come upon the great hands of God fashioning this world's story. They felt that beneath all the events, common and secular, that befell them, the battles they had to fight, the journeys they had to make, the famines that destroyed their crops, the outbursts of prosperity, the victories that were won by them, the lives they lived in homes like ours—behind and beneath all that they felt that God held the reins in His hand, that He Himself was thinking of them, had designs in them, was shaping and fashioning their fortunes, controlling all that befell them, and they comprehended that the greatest thing in this world is to get to know God.
The people at this point in their story had beenwandering about in the wilderness for nearly forty years; at last they had been led by Moses to the very edge of the territory of Edom. Nothing lay between them and the land God had promised them except the country belonging to their kinsmen, the Edomites. You can understand how the hearts and faces of the people were flushed with eager expectation. Oh! they were so sick of that restless, weary life in the barren desert, and the pictures were called up before their eyes in their dreams at night, and in their day visions through the bright sunny hours, of those smiling vineyards, those oliveyards, and those waving cornfields in that land flowing with milk and honey, existing somewhat in fact, but very much in the imagination of those who were to be its possessors. Nothing lay between them and the actual possession and enjoyment but the country of Edom, so they sent an eager message to the king, their kinsman, asking leave to pass through the territory so that they might get at their enemies and his. The king of Edom doubted them, or he was churlish, and refused to give them passage. No doubt every brave young Hebrew warrior went to Moses at once and said, "Let us force our way through; if they will not yield us passage we shall make it for ourselves—we are able, we have the weapons, we have the spirit; let us get at the homes that are waiting for us." But then that would have been to enter into the land of promise with a bloodstain on their conscience, with a bitter, bad memory, spoiling all the joy of it; for those Edomites were their blood relations, and blood meant a vast deal in those old days—even if your brother treated you ill you must not stain your hands with his blood. To have your very living and money-making all corroded with that colour of blood of a nearkinsman shed, was to get what your heart longed for, but to get it spoiled. So Moses, under Divine guidance, told them, "We must go back into the wilderness, we must make a big, roundabout march, and reach the land at some other point." Unwillingly the people agreed; they packed up all their baggage once again, put their weapons into their sheaths, turned their backs on the smiling land of Canaan, and their faces to the arid stretch of the sandy, scorched wilderness, and set out. But before they had gone very far their spirit ran short—that is what the old Hebraist says literally—their spirit ran down, they could not stand it. Man turned to man, and said, "This is too hard; more than man can endure; the thing is intolerable; Moses is blundering; let us depose our leader and choose generals of our own, and force our way across Edom into the Promised Land. What is the use of this God—this Moses who brought us out of Egypt and kept us in the wilderness all these weary years—at every new camp leaving a graveyard behind us, dying man after man, with no prospect before, no progress made, no goal reached, no land of rest attained?"
Now I wonder how many of my hearers to-day are wandering in the desert just like these Hebrews, and have been wandering in a wilderness for years and years. I am pretty sure that that is so with some of you old folks with white hair on your heads. Ah! it is so very far away in the Eastern world and in Old Testament times, this story of these wanderers, never living in a comfortable house, never owning any land, packing up, and on again, wondering where they are going to die, with nothing much to look forward to. Yes, but here in London, living in your own house, in your own workshop, there are men and women wandering in thewilderness. Ah! what a deal of weary waiting there is for young men and maidens, in this artificially bad society of ours at the present day—which has been made by selfishness much more than by the love of God and the love of man—waiting with divine instincts that God has put into their hearts; dreaming of a land of promise, a land of rest, a land flowing with milk and honey.
Ay, it is wandering in a wilderness. Our hearts were not made to live in a wilderness; our hearts were made to live in homes; we were all meant to be in a promised land. There is no need to ask who is to blame. There the wildernesses are, and they have to be got through. It is not easy. Many a time the bravest heart breaks down. The last straw breaks the camel's back. Some little extra worry or care adds itself on, and then the gentle woman or the courageous, uncomplaining man is broken in heart and spirit—oh! so weary—ay, and if they have a tender conscience, upbraiding themselves, counting it sin to feel so tired. Why have they not been doing good? Have they not been following the steps of Jesus? And there they are worn out in being good as He was. Do you remember how sometimes He sighed a great sigh? how sometimes He was so sick of men and their waywardness and selfishness and wilfulness, that for His soul's sake He fled from them and hurried off to the mountain-top to get away above the world, up beneath the blue sky into the purer air, up where God was direct above Him, and He all alone; then came back next morning all the braver and able to bear the battle once again? No, do not blame yourself if you are often very weary. Do not try to pretend that you like your wilderness, that you do not wish anything different.You may have got so used to your wilderness as to be like those people in the old Bastille. Some of the prisoners, we are told, were not willing to go into the world again; they did not know it. So there are hearts that get so wedded to sorrow that they are almost afraid to have done with it. Still, as a general rule, hearts do long for joy, for sunlight, for success. It is human nature, and there is no harm in being weary when the clouds are always over the heavens. Christ was weary, and He understands you and your heart.
Now, I have willingly allowed myself to run the risk even of exaggeration in sympathising with the men and women whose lives are a wilderness, and who are exposed to these dangers in their weariness, in the hardness of their battle. But now, precisely because of that danger, to steel your heart against its temptations, I am bound to speak about the other side; I am bound to ask you men and women, whose lives are not so good and rich as they ought to be, "Is not the blame, at least somewhat, your own?"
Why had these Israelites been wandering forty years in the wilderness? God had led them to the edge of the Promised Land, and bidden them go in and take it, and they had not the manhood to do it, they were such cowards that they trembled, they were craven-hearted; and so they could not enter because of their unbelief. Ah! it was no good to turn round on God and blame Him; it was no good to attack the brave-hearted Moses; it was their own fault that their life was spent in the wilderness. But, more than that, we must not make too much of the hardship, and the pain, and the weariness of wilderness wandering. It is human nature to want always sunshine and to hate storms; to love hours of play and shirk hours of toil; but, after all,does not the rain do as much for the corn as the sunshine? Does not darkness do as much on earth as light? Do we not need hardness as well as lightness in our inner lives if we are to make ourselves men and women? It was years of wandering in the wilderness that turned those Egyptian slaves into the dauntless warriors that carried Canaan by storm. Ah! men and women sitting in the church to-day with your children round you, do not spoil their lives, but lead them to live nobly. Was it not when you were kept to your tasks and toil, when you got your share of the world's burdens and the world's pain—was it not in the things least agreeable to you that there were formed within you elements of character that are doing most to make your joy to-day? Oh, do not grudge them to your children, do not grudge them to yourself! God gives them. Surely it is supreme wisdom to take our life in its entirety from God, to sing through the whole gamut of life, the low wailing note of sorrow as well as the bright, dancing, radiant notes of joy, rejoicing in God so that the music of our life when it is done shall be filled with the fulness of that great Heart Divine that planned and fashioned it.
There was deadly danger in that murmuring of the children of Israel. You must not imagine that God resented it because of the insult to His dignity. God is above such a feeling as that, He does not resent the ignorance, with the mixture of superstition, that goes into the lives, ay, of good men and women, Protestant or Roman Catholic. He takes men's hearts and their real life. It was not the insult to Him in their murmurs that made Him deal with them so strongly. Oh, it was not sternness at all that dealt with them, it was love unutterable! They were ready to spoil their lives, torush away on their own plans to make their fortunes, and so to bring themselves to ruin. Do you know how God checked them? They were complaining of the food that they had, and of their long weary marches, and the heartlessness of their toil in the wilderness, instead of having comfortable homes and rich farms, and God cured them by sending among them fiery serpents that bit them, filled their veins with venom, agony, and death, and as they lay there writhing in pain with death looking into their eyes they said, "What fools we were to repine and complain because of the bread that was tasteless and the life that was void of interest." That was God's way of curing men who were about to spoil their lives by discontent. Is it not God's way still? You men sitting there, do you remember that for years you had been bad-hearted, bitter, discontented, because your life was not great or famous, till God sent that deadly illness and you lay in bed like to die, and then you would have given all you had to get back to that life that you thought so little of? I have seen the father who made the foolish mistake of harping too much on the faults and failings of those who dwelt in his home, not acknowledging the large amount of good and obedience, but ever making misery and bitterness there, and thinking himself justified in doing it, accounting himself an unappreciated, unrewarded man, till a day came when God sent a fiery serpent into his heart, when the blinds were drawn down in that house, and a life lay still and silent that had had faults, but had been sweet, and loving, and lovable. Or, a real disgrace has come to a home, and a child has done a deed that might break a father's heart. Oh, the misery and the pity of it, to see that man sitting there all alone with his head bent and hisface buried in his hands, thinking of the years that might have been bright with joy, and love, and cheer, and that he in his madness had made bad and bitter! Ay, it was a fiery serpent, but it was effective.
Yet God's heart shrinks from those sharp penalties that come to cure us of our sins. See, what happened the instant those Israelites returned to Him, ignominiously crying to the very Moses, and the very God, they had cast off and grumbled at, to come and save them.
Ay, but God is more eager than they. Make the brazen serpent, lose not a moment. Set it up on high, and tell them that one look is enough, and they shall live. That is Godlike; that is how God forgives. Why did God bid Moses make the brazen serpent and set it up on that pole? God could have healed these men by telling them to look up even in any way. Why precisely the brazen serpent should be the instrument of their cure I do not know; the Bible does not tell me. I can only tell you a thought that has come to me about it. Perhaps it was for this reason: It would be surely the thought of every dying Hebrew who looked at that serpent and felt a new life pulsing through all his veins, and the pain of death vanishing away, that that serpent came from God, and was a very token and proof of the warm heart-love of God to him. But it would not be so easy for the man that had been bitten and lay there dying to think of that fiery serpent that bit him as a messenger of God's love. He would be more likely to think that the fiery serpent, that came with death in his bite, was from the devil. And yet the serpent that bit him to death came from God, and came from God's love as absolutely as the serpent that healed. Is not that it? Could they but put two and two together, wouldnot the thought flash into their heart, "A serpent God gave to heal; a serpent it was that hurt"? Is it then so, that the serpent that harmed came from God's love, as much as the serpent that healed? Is not that just God's way with you? Do not many of you sitting in the church to-day remember great sorrows or sharp blows of disaster that came into your life, and at first you writhed against them and were in great pain? You could not think there was any love of God in them; but they have lain there and they have made your heart more gentle, they have made your faith more strong, they have brought God nearer to you, they have made you kinder in your own home, and you look at them now with the glow of a goodness that has grown from them, and you say to yourself that not merely the goodness that has followed since, but the pain that came and hurt was from God—from God who is love.
How did the healing come to the dying Hebrew who looked at the brazen serpent? Not from any efficacy in the serpent, not from any magical virtue in the look; the new life that came to him came direct from God. Why, then, did God interpose the looking at the serpent? Why did God make the cure dependent on a gaze at a serpent erected there by Moses? I will tell you why. It was not the look; it was the change of heart that was in the look that God wanted. The real mischief that had to be undone was not the bodily death of those men; there was a worse evil than that, there was the loss of faith in God, the fracture of a loving dependence on God. That is the essence of all sin. Sin is disobedience to God. It means that you snatch your life out of God's hand, that you will not live according to God's will, that you make yourselfyour God; you will be your own master, you will take your own way—you can do better for yourself than God. Now, mark, you never would choose that sinful course as long as you trusted God. Loss of faith, that is sin. It is no good talking of cures, no good talking of salvation, unless you undo the mischief done by sin. Loss of faith: that is the beginning, the essence, the end of sin. Ah! that doctrine of salvation through faith that men mock at and call a legal sophism, it has got the heart of all truth in it, only I think we are to blame that we have so much talked of faith as the means of salvation as if it were some external condition attached by God to salvation. Faithissalvation; Jesus Christ hangs there on the cross as Moses lifted up the brazen serpent. The moment a man believes on Him he is saved from sin. How? Through some magical virtue in the cross, in the Body hanging there, in the blood poured out, or in the man's mental act of faith? Never, never. That Christ hanging there is the living embodiment of faith in God: His life, His death, are the incarnate declaration that all sin is error, that all sin is an outrage, that men erred and went wrong when they disobeyed God. He condemns all sin by His life of holiness, by His death of antagonism against sin, hanging there on the cross, wrestling with sin, seeking to undo it, offering to God the world's love and obedience that sinful men have failed to give to God, dying in their stead, obeying in their stead, making Himself a perfect sacrifice and substitute for this world of ours. All that still would not be salvation, is not salvation, to you until the sight of it turns you, regenerates you, makes you see that all your sin was madness, folly; fills you with hatred of it. When once the love of God binds you over to follow that Christ in obedience to God, in trustto God, in love of God, that is faith in Christ, that is salvation.
That serpent became an object of idolatrous and superstitious worship. It was very natural, and it is very evil. Hezekiah with his reforming zeal took it, and with real reverence, though with seeming external irreverence, dashed it in pieces. Has not that also a parallel, hundreds of parallels in Church history? Hezekiah rightly interpreted the heart of God; he believed that the great heart of God up there in heaven was pained every time that a poor ignorant Israelite, man or woman, poured out on that brazen image the gratitude that should have gone direct to Him. And so it is that in the Church's story you find that whenever priests have set up any channel or means of actual grace divine, grace supernatural, and have attached to it undue reverence, and made it bulk too largely in the eyes and worship of common men and women, so as to come between them and God, then God has raised up infidels and unbelievers to break it and dash it to pieces. Was not that what was done by the Reformers? At the Reformation, when the Mass had been set between eager longing hearts of men and women seeking forgiveness and the great loving heart of God that gives it, it was taken and shattered. Ay, and when this Bible of ours—this Protestant Bible of ours, or our great evangelical doctrines, are taken and have given to them a place of importance in our salvation and in our belief that they ought not to have, once again be sure of it God will create a true, lawful, and blessed recoil, and you will have these sacred things even dashed down to a position of undue depreciation. It is God's ways of leading us to Himself. Ah! there is a grand thought in that—the unutterable glory about our God thatshines for me through all the tale of that great battle about belief, and doctrines, and Church institutions that makes up the Church's story—through it all what I see is the heart of God our Father longing for the touch of our hands in His hands, the gaze of our eyes into His, giving us things that shall help us to Him, lesson books to teach us about Him, steps that shall lead us to His feet. But the moment we make these a barrier that keeps us far from Him, things sacred and good are dashed away. What does that mean? It means to you and me the revelation in all wonder, awe, and comfort of how tender, near, and true and clinging is the love of God's heart to you and me—of that God whom we sometimes think so awful and so terrible, but who in His inmost being through and through is love, wholly, absolutely love.
Psalmlxxiii.
I AM going to ask you to study with me this morning the 73rd Psalm. Before I read the Psalm I had better tell you what it is about; then you will follow the line of thought in it with greater ease. The central faith of the Hebrew religion was that God governs this world according to the principles of morality, that He is on the side of goodness, and against wickedness. The facts of life clashed with that dogma of Hebrew faith. Good men in those old times found it as hard to believe in God and goodness as we do, and they got just as little, or just as much, supernatural help as we do. Therefore they could nowhere find an absolute certainty; they nowhere received from heaven a supernatural and complete explanation of the enigmas of life. God, because He loved them, deliberately left them to fight their battle for faith with the actual facts and the actual difficulties. He left them constantly trying to find a complete intellectual solution of the problem, and failing to do that, just as we fail; and so He shut them up to discovering a resting-place for faith in the heart when they could not get it in the head. A great many psalms have welled out of men's hearts, just like fountains away among the hills, and valleys,and slopes. This 73rd Psalm is brimful of human thoughts, and duties, and longings, pains, and battles, and victories, just like bits of your life when you were all alive to the real grandeur of your human existence, when your heart longed to think loftily of life, and to hold fast to God, and precisely because your heart was all alive you found it was not easy. I am going to ask you to follow this man's struggle against doubt, to watch the steps by which he descended into the valley of real questioning of God's goodness and of God's government of the world, and then to trace the steps by which he climbed back again to a hill-top of serene and tranquil certainty.
I have already indicated to you that I do not think that anywhere in the Old Testament, or in the New Testament, or in all Christian theology or philosophy, does there exist a complete demonstration of the fact that God is good, and that He is on the side of goodness. Whether that is true or not every intelligent believer will admit that this 73rd Psalm is no complete theodicy. It will not hold its own as a logical demonstration that the government of this world is moral or just. The man's certainty that there is a good God, and that God takes sides with good men, rests not upon sight, but upon faith; it is a solution of the heart, not of the head. Thank God! that is the universal law of religious experience. One thing I want to point out to you at the beginning, especially to those of you who are thinkers, and who study the various religions of the world. There is a very simple characteristic about the fashion in which the problem of life is dealt with in those Psalms, when we compare them, say, with the very finest of Greek devotion and Greek religion. In all Greek philosophy there is onlyone fixed quantity—that is, the world. The problem of Greek thought is this: Given the world, the clear, solid, certain fact, to find the God that made it. They took life as it stood, and from its elements and components they tried to determine what kind of a Maker this world has had. Now, at the very outset, all through Hebrew religious thought and philosophy, you find two fixed quantities. There is the world, but over against it there is God—God, holy, just, righteous; and therefore, while the Greek problem was always, Given the world, to construct God, the Hebrew problem is, Given the world as it exists, and given God as He exists, can those be reconciled? It is a very simple and striking contrast. I will tell you the picturesque aspect that it gives to the two literatures. Greek thought is all philosophical, speculative—great minds rising back to the First Cause, from this actual world; and this world being what it is, no wonder that at one time they reached iron Fate, at another time Materialism, at another time Pantheism, at another time Manichæism. Hebrew thought does not sway about in that fashion; it is simply concerned with this—the vindication of God's character; and there is the striking contrast. In Greek poetry, in all Pagan poetry, you will find warm-hearted, large-minded men contemplating life, with all its great wrongs, injustices, pains, sorrows, disappointments, and then breaking into pity and compassion for men. In Hebrew poetry, in Hebrew religion, you will everywhere find the same dark aspects of life fearlessly held up, acknowledged, and confronted; but what do you think is the supreme pain that breaks in upon the hearts of the Hebrew sages and seers as they contemplate the world's enigmas? It is anxiety for the character of God. It is not pity for poor men and women, groundunder the wheels of this earth, but a terribly agonising question, "How can we defend God and God's goodness when the world is so evil and so dark?" Ah, you want to prove what the Bible is by its own light, to show that it has a right to be spoken of as a revelation and as inspired! Do not go to all the trivial Mediæval theories and doctrines about it; go to the book itself, and go to the world. It can hold its own, without claiming anything outside to buttress it up. Set the heart-life in it against the heart-life of any other religion, and you will see that it has the blue of God's heaven in it—unsullied, splendid, perfect. Now, I am going to take this one Psalm—to take one glimpse into that long, painful chemistry of revelation, as God came into human hearts with pain and perplexity, with struggle, with triumph, with glory, and made those hearts know Him, not through explanations, but by His indwelling in them, His life, His love, His holiness, echoing and throbbing into their heart life.
I am now tempted to break off here for a moment, and say to you what always strikes me when I look at that aspect of this revealed, inspired Bible—that it does seem just possible that the good Christian Church we belong to in our time is not in quite the right way of thinking about religious doubt. I am not talking about doubt of the head, the intellect, and the schools—intellectual fence, that sort of triviality; let it alone, it is not worth taking notice of. But the real doubt of any age, the doubt of any man's heart and head—what are we to think of that? Are we to stamp it as devilish? Are we to denounce it, and excommunicate it? Why, we might be fighting against God. If I read my Bible aright, real, genuine, patient struggle for faith means just the birth-throes of God's revelation of Himself inmen's hearts. Now come to this point, and see what it reveals to you that is sacred, pathetic, instructive in the heart of a man dead hundreds of years ago. Look into his heart, and you may learn a great deal about your own heart. The problem that confronts him is the fact that has always been very evident in every age, that honesty is not by any means always the best policy, if by that you mean that it pays you best. I am putting it in homely language. It is a big question. Do the world's good things go predominantly to the good men? or do they go to the clever and unscrupulous men? In the professions is it your honest, truthful man, of modest merit, that succeeds best, or your humbug, impostor, flatterer, self-advertiser? In the State, in politics, is it your honest man, that speaks truths to the people, that is lauded and flattered? or is it your skilful adventurer? In the City does strict honour make a man's fortune? or are profits bigger in proportion as a man can wink at things? Anywhere on the large scale are the virtuous classes the most prosperous? Are the powers of this world raised up to their lofty elevation by goodness, or rather in spite of badness? Is God on the side of goodness? or does He not care? or is He rather on the side of violence, and wrong, and wickedness? Now, this point is the real struggle in the poet's heart, to solve that difficulty of life. I am going to read it to you, giving you the headings of the various parts of it, the steps of emotion and of thought through which his heart has passed.
He begins, first of all, with the point at which he ends. This is the right result of that struggle of doubt and faith within him; he believes that God is on the side of goodness. But there is a curious little word, very difficult to reproduce in English, that expresseshow the firm conviction that he has of goodness having God backing it was reached through painful conflict. "Surely"—yes, after all—"God is good to His people, good to such as are pure in heart." Then we come to the history of doubt, the progress of doubt, in the man's soul. That you have in the first fourteen verses. The first step of it was his recognition of the fact of prosperous wickedness. It is a little difficult to divide the Psalm exactly, and I do not give you the divisions that I am choosing as certainly the precise, original structure of the poem, but roughly they bring out the outstanding thoughts. The first division would be verses 2 to 5—the fact of prosperous wickedness: "But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well-nigh slipped. For I was envious at bad men—at successful bad men—when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. For they have no barriers, no entanglements; they are never tripped up on to the time of their death"—that, I think, is the real translation—"but their success remains firm. They are not in trouble like other men; neither are they plagued like other men."
That is the first step of doubt. Then comes the second, the effect upon themselves: "Therefore pride is like a golden chain round their neck; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes stand out with fatness; they have more than heart could wish. They scoff, and in wickedness utter oppression, pour forth oppressive taunt; they speak loftily. They have set their mouth in the heaven, and their tongue stalketh through the earth."
Then there is a third step of doubt, the effect upon good men: "Therefore God's people are prevented that way, and the waters of a full cup are drained by them. They say, How can God know? and is thereknowledge in the Most High? Behold, these are the wicked; and being always secure, they heap up wealth."
Then there is the effect on the poet himself: "Surely in vain have I cleansed my heart, and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning." You see here the doubt reaching its last full result.
Then we come to the recoil, the restoration of faith. That also is set in three steps. The first is the perception of the fact of retribution. Verse 15: "Had I made up my mind, I will speak thus; behold, I should have dealt treacherously with the generation of Thy children. When I thought how I might know this—how to read this riddle—it was too hard for me, until I went into the sanctuary of God, and considered the last end of them. Surely Thou didst set them in slippery places; Thou hast hurled them down to destruction. How are they become a desolation in a moment! They are utterly consumed with terrors. As a nightmare when one awaketh, so, O Lord, when Thou awakest Thou dost despise [flout] the presentment of them."
Then there is the next step, the perception of his own stupidity: "My mind was in a ferment, and I was pricked in my heart. How brutish I was, and how ignorant! I was no better than a proud beast before Thee; and I am continually with Thee, held by Thy right hand."
Then there is the last step, the perception of the immeasurable joy, the intrinsic superiority, of goodness. "Whom have I in heaven but Thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee. My flesh and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of myheart, and my portion for ever. For, lo, they that are far from Thee shall perish; thou hast destroyed all them that go straying away from Thee. But it is good for me to draw near to God: I have made the Lord my refuge, that I may tell all Thy works."
Now, for our own help and instruction, let us follow, step by step, the struggle of that good man's heart. Is it evident on the face of things that goodness has the best of it in this world? Now, I am going to say to you a thing that perhaps many of you will think little of me for saying, but I cannot help thinking that the poet exaggerated the actual facts; and I am quite persuaded that a great many people who think themselves very wise, and are very wise, at the present day, make far too much of the external material advantage gained by dishonesty. I am quite prepared to admit that goodness often keeps a man back from earthly joy. I am quite prepared to admit that the prizes of this world go far too much to men that possess no real right to them. There are endless social wrongs and individual wrongs. Things are not rightly adjusted, either in the Church or in the world, in professions or in business. All that is true. Nevertheless, I rather think that the amount of it is exaggerated. I do not think that is the predominant aspect of life. It is only when a man is morbid, when existence is pressing too hard on himself, when he is sharply injured and wronged, that he would take upon him to say that evil out and out, clearly and without question, has the best of it. I am talking, of course, of our society nowadays; but I rather think that in all states of society it could never have been the case that wickedness absolutely had the best of it. I will tell you why: Because this world cannot stand without a good deal of love and a good deal of faith, agood deal of honesty, a good deal of mutual trust. Why, if business were the utter mass of cheating and unscrupulosity that some men would have us believe, you would have an end of all credit, of all business. There must be some brotherliness; there must be a certain trustworthiness; there must be a considerable amount of honesty. It is the very salt of the world; it maintains it; the world would come to an end without it. But all the same, I am willing to admit that that is the superficial aspect of existence, and that it is a very staggering blow to men's faith, especially faith that is inherited from one's father, that is not a man's own; it is a thing to make a young man's heart bitter; it is a thing to make him hesitate and doubt whether he ought to hold to the pathway of honour. It is not, I think, the paramount, the predominant aspect of life, looked at calmly and dispassionately, quite apart from religious faith, but certainly it is a very prominent aspect—prominent because it is superficial. Well, then, that fact of successful wrong-doing is the cause of religious doubt, but not by any means a very dangerous cause.
We come to the second source of doubt and questioning—an infinitely more subtle and hazardous one. It is the perception that successful ill-doers do not seem to be miserable. You know how we are all taught that bad men have such terribly evil consciences, that harpies are always behind them, that their hearts are gnawed with dread and anxiety, that they cannot sleep at night, that remorse haunts them. Not a bit of it. You go into the world and pick out men who have gained their wealth, who have wrung it out of the heart's blood of their fellow-men—got it by downright dishonesty; their eyes stand out with fatness, they roll about in theircarriages, they have splendid houses, and everybody bows down to them and makes much of them; their faces are wreathed with smiles of self-satisfaction; you sit at their tables, and they tell you how successful they have been; they expect you to envy them; they are not humble and miserable. Then the deadly question comes to you, Where, then, is God? Ah, one can quite understand God letting the external world run its own course! One might explain in some way that God allows, to try men, the prizes of wealth and the joys of life to go to men that do not deserve them. As a good man once said to me, "It is plain that God does not think much of money—why, look at the kind of people he gives it to!" That is so; but the one thing you would believe is this, that in that strange inner world of the human heart, the mind, the conscience God could not keep still. If He gives them the external gift, if He sends them the desire of their flesh, He will send leanness into their soul. Why do you not see their faces haggard? Why can you not trace the lines of care? Why does not shame and degradation sit upon the wealthy man's face who gained his wealth by cheating and lying, by dishonour and meanness? Oh, they seem so happy, so contented, so pleased, so proud, so arrogant! Why does their tongue reach up to heaven, in its pride, and haughtiness, and complacency? Well, you would think that that is a deadly enough doubt to be gnawing at a good lad's heart; but there is a still deadlier one. Here you have the deadliest cause of doubt, when a man, pressed hard by the great fact of prosperous ill-doing, staggered by that blow, does not see the inner, ethical, moral vengeance of God stamped on it. He looks round for confirmation to the good men in the Church; he looks at religiousChristian society, he falls back on it, to let it support him, to let it help him; and what does he discover when his eyes pierce through and penetrate? In the heart within him he begins to recognise the hearts of others. Everywhere the Church is secretly doubting too; good men are longing for a share in the ill-gotten gain—ay, tampering with their consciences, themselves turning into the same direction, drinking of the waters of the same cup, and then some of them, more reckless or more honest, speaking straight out: "Yes, I was brought up, like you, to believe in virtue, in honesty, in God, and in goodness; but I have seen throughout that this world is not governed by a good God. If there is a good God, He does not know or does not care; He does not step in; it is the wicked that have the best of it in this world; I am going to take that course." Ah, the moral perversion, the tainted breath of the base, selfish, greedy, unscrupulous world! that detected in the heart of his own father, the good elder, the church member; that detected in his own mother, not valuing or choosing for the society of her home the honourable, the pure, the good, the true, but the people with money, and tainted reputations, and all the rest of it; that is the deadliest thing; that makes the real doubt, the real unbelief; that carries a lad, not to books of philosophy—he will never take much harm from them, even if he has head enough to understand them—but carries him clean away from religion, into shady company too, and takes the virtue and morality out of him, making him sell himself for money in life's sacredest relationships: it is that—the perversion of good. Oh, how much we Christian men and women have to answer for when we denounce sceptics and worldlings, the ungodly young men whostop going to church, and all that! Ay, poor souls, they will have to answer for it! but how much shall we have to answer for it too? The Church, is it not tainted by worldliness? Do we go and take the bravest, the most patient, the most loyal, the most prayerful, the most devout Sunday-school teacher, a working man, and put him in the chair of our Sunday-school assemblies in Exeter Hall? No, no; it is not pure goodness. I do not know that we can help it, but it would be worth while trying that system, instead of the Church, for want of faith, making so very much of the world, of social position, and of purse power.
But I have rather wandered from my point. Doubt has now run its course, completed its curriculum. The question is often raised, Does it matter what a man believes? No, not what he believes about the abstract theories or explanations either of philosophy or theology—it will not matter much what he thinks about these abstruse questions; but it matters infinitely and eternally what he thinks about God, and goodness, and life. Ah, there a man's heart-faiths make his life-conduct! It was so with the poet here, when those dark, demon doubts had filled his soul, when his mind was in a ferment, when his heart was pricked and bitter within him, when he heard good men—men that were good once—round him saying, "Does God know?" and when he felt himself in a God-forsaken world, where there was nothing but each man snatching the best he could get, where everything was given over to wickedness and evil. Ah, then, such a man does not stop at theoretical atheism and scepticism! he goes farther. "Surely in vain have I kept my hands clean; I have been a fool to deny myself forbidden joys and pleasures; I have been punished, I have been injured; those thatwere unscrupulous, and impure, and dishonest have had the best of it; I have done with being a fool; I am going to have my share too." Now doubt has reached its most dangerous point; it is going to hurry into forbidden action.
It was at this moment that the recoil came. I will tell you how. If a man has got any heart at all, he can go any length in his own head with his doubts and questions about whether there is a God or a heaven, or whether it is worth while trying to be holy, and pure, and honest; but if he has any heart at all, the moment that he says, "I am going to be pure no longer, but I am going to be foul," then there is something in him that draws him back. He sees himself, or rather he feels, that he is not doing harm to any one with those doubts that are in his own intellect, but the moment he says, "I am going out into the world, in the train, in the town, in the warehouse, and I am going to tell it, right and left, that I count it an old wife's fable that there is a God and heaven, that I count the man an idiot who denies himself any fleshly joy that he can get without coming within the grasp of the law"—I say, if he has any heart at all, he suddenly thinks to himself, "If I say that to my younger brother, if I say that to that innocent maiden, I shall be doing a cruel wrong to the generation of God's people." Oh, there is an eternal, immovable fact! Doubt may have all logic on its side, but doubt and the denial of God and of virtue are the world's damnation. It may be an advantage to a man to cheat and steal, but it cannot be an advantage to his neighbours. Take the worst man in the City, and ask him if he would wish that all goodness, all virtue, all religion should be so crushed out that every man should becomea thief, a robber, a burglar. No; he does not want that. Even in the case of an infidel, if he be a man of fine conscience and fine heart—I have known such—not for his life would he tell his doubts to a child, not for his life would he say a word to stop that mother teaching her boy to pray. I have known such men who told me that they were thankful that the mother of their children kept on doing it. Yes, that Psalm is far away from our theoretical theologies or intellectual apologies and the rest of it. See how intensely human it is—that recognition that doubt held within the intellect is not very harmful, but let it go out into the world, and it will do unspeakable mischief; it is that that gives the doubter check. Ay, and there is reason in it, rationality. When a man recognises that fact he has got to go farther. If doubt manifestly would harm the world, if the denial of God, and goodness, and the earth's moral government would damage human society, then there must be something wrong in the reasoning that leads up to that denial. The facts cannot be as I have fancied, or else my inferences are wrong; for never, never can it be evil to know the truth. Therefore that denial of mine that there is a good God, or that if there be a God He governs this world by goodness, must be false. Now all things appear to the man in a new light. Why? Because he has got up to a great elevation. Suddenly it darts upon him, "Before, I was looking at this world out of my little self; I judged everything by its effect upon my own personality, my own life. I was suffering, and therefore all things must be wrong." What a poor little aspect that is! Now he has risen up to a point where he stands as God stands; he looks at the big world out of himself, and he sees that the doubt, the denial,would destroy all that is best in the world. And he looks farther; he has reached to God's sanctuary. Now his eyes travel over wider reaches of human story. Before he was like a man down in a valley where there is a winding river, and just where he stood the river seemed to flow in one direction, and he went away and proclaimed to men that the river ran north. Now he has travelled away up the mountain, and he is able to look over the whole extent, and he sees that there was a winding and twisting in the stream, but observes that its great ultimate course is to the southern seas. The man stands up above this world of ours, he looks over the great spread of its course and history, and what is the absolute conclusion? That everywhere in the end immorality has death in it; that violence, wickedness, selfishness ruin themselves; that oppressive dynasties have fallen, and corrupt peoples have been struck down; that sin everywhere has God's vengeance set in it, and ends in death. Everywhere in the end virtue does triumph and survive, goodness proves superior. That is a fact which the evolutionist tells us. This world seeks and reaches the moral, the good, the true, the noble in intellect, heart, and soul. It was made, the religious man says, by a good God, and it is making for goodness. Yes; but there comes another revelation. For the good man says to himself, "Now, how came it that I could not see that before?" and suddenly an overwhelming shame falls upon him. "How could I not see that before? Oh, because I was such a little soul, because I lived in such a despicable, little world! I failed to see the truth because I was as base as those bad men. What makes them forsake God and goodness? Because they count earthly gain the supreme thing. Why was I so bitteragainst their getting the earthly gain? Because I counted it the supreme thing. I, a man made in God's image, a man held by God's hand, a man whose will was being overshadowed, and led, and guided by God's Spirit, through all was so ignorant and so brutish that I thought God's best gift that He had to give to His children was money, or fleshly pleasure, or earthly adulation. I was no better than a brute beast. To the brute beast God can give nothing more than meat, and drink, and fleshly sensual delight; but that a man held in God's hand, loved by God, should have great joy about these things! Ah, my doubt grew not out of the world's enigmas alone! it grew out of my own low morals." Now he stands in a new position. He sees as God sees, and he says to himself, "Ah, let this world grow as ill as it may; even if it were the case that money, power, social ambition, earthly rewards did go predominantly to wickedness, what then? Here am I, a man loving honour, truth, justice, mercy, purity, God; shall I hesitate for one moment if I must lose all the world? Can I hesitate for one moment? No; goodness alone, with no earthly reward, is heaven, and far more precious than all worldly gain." Why? Because goodness has in it the very breath of God, the throb of His Spirit, the echo of His heart. The good man has God in him, loving him, continually with him, he continually with God; and this world lies beneath him, and death beneath his feet. Ah, the best this world can give trembles before death and the grave, and breaks and is gone! but in goodness the human heart clasps God, and doubt is at an end.
Oh, how much our world to-day wants that supreme daring faith in goodness just for itself, and that close fellowship with God, that defies all questionings, alldoubts, that would stand if all the evidences about our Gospels and Epistles were swept away, still sure that God is up there, that God loves men, and that God draws them to Himself to make them holy, as their Father in heaven is holy!