PREACHED IN CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL, JANUARY 3rd, 1915.
“Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.”—Deut. v. 33.
“Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.”—Deut. v. 33.
We have been summoned this evening by our King and by the Chief Pastor of our Church, to a Service of humble prayer and intercession to Almighty God on behalf of our Nation and Empire now engaged in war; and in the Form of Humble Prayer in which we have just joined there is an exhortation explaining and urging upon us the spirit in which that intercession should be made. In addressing you this evening I would draw special attention to one point in that exhortation. Before all else, we are told, we must remember that those who would receive good at the hands of God must go to Him in humility, with a due sense of their many faults and continual short-comingsin His sight. In other words, a humble prayer must be before all else a prayer of humiliation. It is a principle which is impressed upon us every day in the Exhortation at the beginning of our prayers. “The Scripture,” we are told, “moveth us in sundry places to acknowledge and confess our manifold sins and wickednesses; and that we should not dissemble nor cloke them before the face of Almighty God our Heavenly Father; but confess them with a humble, lowly, penitent and obedient heart; to the end that we may obtain forgiveness of the same, by his infinite goodness and mercy,” and we are surely bound, on an occasion like this, to take to heart the words which follow, viz., that “although we ought at all times humbly to acknowledge our sins before God: yet ought we most chiefly so to do, when we assemble and meet together” as we do to-day, to implore His special mercy in the greatest crisis which our nation and Empire has ever had to encounter. If every morning and evening ought to waken in us a humble, lowly, and penitent confession of our sins, surely an hour when, as a whole Nation, we are seekingGod’s merciful and gracious help calls for still deeper and humbler confession of our sins.
There has been, I fear, some reluctance among us to yield ourselves to this penitent humiliation, and it will be well therefore to remind ourselves a little of the reasons there are for it. Now the first and most patent of all the reasons why we should recognize our sins and wickedness is the bare and ghastly fact of this war in itself. We are all distressed and grieved by it, and are all saying what a horrible thing it is that war—and such a war—should be possible in a Christian Europe. But what we should first of all realize is that it is a horrible exhibition of the sin and wickedness of human nature. Just contrast what Europe was a few months ago with the scenes that are now exhibited in Belgium, France, and Poland. A few months ago, Europe was a prosperous country, full of wealth, comfort, and enjoyment of all kinds. Its many millions were engaged in quiet occupations which employed their energies happily. “They ate, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded.” Fathers andmothers and children, families young and old, cities and villages were in the enjoyment of plenty, and full of hope for the future. God had prospered them, and there was much hope that the wants and sufferings which were still the lot of too many among them might be gradually removed by benevolent legislation and mutual help; but, on a sudden, at a few days’ notice, this scene of happiness, and hope, and well-being is overthrown as if by an earthquake. Some parts of it are overwhelmed by “blood and fire and vapour of smoke,” and the whole of it, from the extreme west of our Isles to the East of Russia, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean is transformed into a vast Barracks, in which sons and fathers are torn from their families, leaving behind them too often the lamentation and mourning of wives and mothers, weeping for those who are not. The language of the prophet is not too strong for the occasion “The land was a Garden of Eden and is become a desolate wilderness.” I ask you, is not such a sudden and disastrous transformation the most clear proof we could have of some deadly evil being at work in human nature?What else, but some deadly, inherent evil could in a few weeks or days blot out all peace in Europe and let loose a sort of hell in human society and human life. We were proud of the growth of civilization, and were constructing all sorts of schemes of social and political development, when, on a sudden, our civilization explodes, and we find ourselves surrounded by its wrecks in fire, and ruin, and carnage, and hatred, and violence of all kinds. All this explosive force of evil must have been there. There must have been corruptions, and sins, and vices at work which we did not surmise; and fair as the life of Europe seemed outside, it must really have been in some respects rotten to the core. This war has not been imposed upon Europe from without, as it was when the great barbarian invaders poured over it fourteen hundred years ago. All this horror, and misery, and bloodshed, and ruin has sprung out of the materials—out of the civilized materials—provided by Europe itself, and it must be some internal disease, some original vice and corruption which is revealed to us in the ghastly spectacle which is now presented by so large apart of the most favoured lands of the world.
Some one perhaps may be tempted to say that this indictment applies to the countries which have provoked this war, but not to Europe at large; but that, I am sure, would be, if not unjust to those countries, at least not candid with respect to ourselves. Is it not the case that, to an increasing extent of late years, the civilization of Europe has been united, and marked in the main by similar characteristics? Have not the literature and many of the ideas of Germany penetrated the literature and the thought of France and England? Has there been conspicuous among us any protest against the habits of thought, the tendencies of religious belief or unbelief, the luxuries if not the waste of living, which have prevailed elsewhere? If the life and civilization of Europe has ended in this great catastrophe, can we honestly stand aside and claim to be free of all blame, and to have had no share in the tendencies and evils which have produced so horrible a result? We shrink from them in their full development, we denounce them, we resolve to fight against themto the last, and to re-establish sounder and more Christian principles of public and social life, but dare we say that we have not dallied with them? Can we honestly claim to have repudiated them at their source, so as to be free from any part or lot in sins and errors which have led to so hideous a result? I will not try to drive such painful questions further home. I will only say that if we are honest with ourselves, we shall not venture to adopt the Pharisee’s attitude and exclaim, on a day like this, “God, I thank Thee that I am not as other men are, or even as this German.” In a word, we have had some share, at all events, in the tone of thought and life which has prevailed in Europe for the last two generations, and we shall be more true to God and to ourselves if we are content, on this day of humble confession and intercession, simply to exclaim “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
But confession of sin should be but the first step to amendment of life, and for the purpose of that amendment we must endeavour to realize more particularly what the sins are, which in God’s righteous judgment have brought this misery uponus. Many of them we have acknowledged in the Litany in which we have joined. We have prayed for deliverance from those sins wherein as a nation we have grieved God. We have confessed to pride, boasting, and self-sufficiency, to covetousness, worldliness, and indifference to the needs of others, to drunkenness, impurity, and all manner of self-indulgence, to trusting in our own strength and forgetting God, to want of faith in God, to want of love to Him and to one another, to a want of charity towards all men. These are the sins charged upon us by the chief pastors of our Church, and they constitute surely a grievous catalogue of vices, sufficient in themselves to account for the failure of the civilization of which we form a part, and to require us to humiliate ourselves very deeply before God. We are called upon by the Archbishops not merely to pray, as we do in our daily Litany, against those evils, but to acknowledge that they are sins wherein, as a nation, we have grieved God. Now it must be left to our individual consciences to apply those grievous confessions to our own hearts and lives. Of some ofthem, perhaps, we shall all acknowledge ourselves to have been guilty; and we are bound to put it earnestly to our hearts and consciences how far we have individually been guilty of them. But it is not for the preacher, who is deeply sensible of his own sins, to press such charges upon others. I would rather adopt this evening the more gracious, and, I hope, more helpful course of reminding you of the one supreme and sufficient method by which all such sins, whatever they may have been, may be overcome, and may be averted for the future.
It is the method and the obligation impressed upon us in the text by the great Law Giver of Israel when he was laying the foundation of the Jewish nation. It is instructive to remember that the discourses of Moses recorded in the Book of Deuteronomy are described as having for their first and immediate object to lay down the principles on which the Jewish people could realize the great purpose which God had in view for them, and could become a strong and prosperous nation. “These,” said Moses, in the verses following the text, “are the commandments,and the statutes, and the judgments, which the Lord your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it: that thou mightest fear the Lord Thy God, to keep all His Statutes and His Commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily.” And then he proceeds to sum up those statutes and judgments in the momentous words which Our Lord Himself selected as the first and great commandment of the Law, “Hear O Israel,” said Moses, “The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” That, in the words of the book in which our Saviour sought the great principles of His own life, and which He quoted again and again as laying down eternal truths—that is the great principle on which a sound moral, religious, and secure national life must be founded—the principle of loving theLord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our might. The God Whom the people of Israel were thus called on to love with all their heart, soul, and might, was the God Who had delivered them out of Egypt and its bondage, and Who was about to establish them in the land of Canaan by wonders and signs which could only have been wrought by His supreme power, and Who, in the most solemn and awful circumstances, had declared at Mount Sinai the cardinal laws of social and national life. The God to whom our Saviour applies the principle was His Own Father, the God Who is seen in His Own words and in His ministry, Whose will is so graciously explained to us in the records of His life and in the words of His Apostles, and Whose character, therefore, and will are clearly and distinctly revealed. Our Lord, when He adopted these words of Moses, declared to the whole world that in order that they may live, and that it may be well with them, and that they may prolong their days in the peace and happiness He designed for them, the one supreme condition is that they should love the God Who is His Father, with alltheir heart, soul, mind, and strength. If they do that, if the whole of their lives is submitted to His will as revealed by His Son Jesus Christ, then they will have a supreme authority, a secure guide in their personal, their family, and their social life; and He adds to the assurance of Moses the promise of His Holy Spirit to interpret His will to them and to assist them in their struggles. That is the one and the sufficient condition for realizing here on earth the blessing of the peace which God designs for us. Life animated by that love would secure it—and that alone.
Now the one question it would be well for us to put to ourselves on this day of confession and self amendment is whether it has not been the chief wickedness, and the growing wickedness, of Europe at large, and of ourselves in particular, to fail to make this love of God, this submission to God and to Christ, the one supreme principle and inspiration of our whole life, private, social, and public. I would ask whether religion, as people generally understand it, has not been allowed to become of late years, in an increasing degree, too much of a private and personalmatter—a matter of individual preference, a part of a man’s character which could hardly be treated as an absolute duty, so that a man who did not live a religious life was, as it were, within his rights, and that he could not be treated as neglecting a supreme obligation? Has it not been our temptation, as a nation, to legislate without a supreme regard to this first duty, so as even to allow our children and the children of the nation to be educated without supreme regard to it? Has not attendance at Divine Worship been grievously neglected of late years as a consequence of this growing decay of the love of God? Have not the words of our Lord and His Apostles been losing the authority which they used to possess among us, and which they must possess with all who believe them to be a revelation of the supreme Will of Almighty God? As a consequence of all this, has there not been a grievous loss among us of the sense that we are all under the judgment of God, that we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, to give account of all that we have done in the body, good or bad? And has not the most momentous of all controllinginfluences been thus grievously weakened in our own lives? It is enough for one like myself to suggest the question. It needs a prophet with a Divine Mission to drive it home.
But the concluding considerations I would urge from such a review of the condition of the Christian world, and of our own world at this moment, is that if we would overcome the sins which have undermined the peace of Europe and brought about the present awful convulsion, if we would restore and re-establish among ourselves those principles of Christian Faith which alone can make the nation great and happy, and keep it so, the one effectual means which includes all others, the one means which would at once enable us to know what we ought to do and would provide us with the grace and power to fulfil it, is to deepen in our own souls, and to revive all around us and among our people at large, that love of God in Jesus Christ which reveals to us “whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report,” which gives us a supreme and eternal motive for following it, and whichensures us the power to overcome the terrible temptations which beset us. Let us go home from these prayers, not merely resolved to amend one particular fault, or to combat one particular evil of our day, but surrendering ourselves more absolutely than we have yet done to the will and love of God our Saviour, in all things bringing the revelation of His will, in our Lord Jesus Christ and in the Scriptures, to bear more than ever on our private, social and public duties. In short, in the words of the text, let us resolve, as the supreme law of our life, to walk in the ways which the Lord our God and our Saviour Jesus Christ have commanded us, that it may be well with us, and that we may prolong our days in the country and the Empire in which His providence and His mercy have placed and supported us.